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A growing body of studies analyzes interest groups' media visibility. Yet little is known about how the drivers of media access may vary across different interest group systems. This article focuses on two major mechanisms through which organizations can gain media visibility: media management efforts and the newsworthiness of elite actors. We hypothesize that media effort explains interest groups' media access more strongly in competitive, pluralist interest group systems and that insider (i.e. "elite") status does so more strongly in hierarchical, corporatist systems. We analyze surveys and media data on interest groups in the pluralist United Kingdom, the moderately corporatist Denmark, and the more strongly corporatist Finland. As hypothesized, media effort is most effective in the UK and weakest in Finland. However, we find only weak support for the insider status hypothesis: there is some evidence of the expected cross-country differences, but the effects are small and unrobust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media attention is a scarce, yet attractive, resource for interest groups. Existing studies show that media attention is concentrated on a relatively small number of well-resourced groups, often representing economic interests. However, the literature still struggles to disentangle the reasons behind this bias in media attention. Is it explained by media selection practices or uneven interest group activity? We cannot separate these two possible mechanisms by simply studying aggregate levels of media attention. In this study, we therefore compare the set of groups that lobby in specific policy areas with the groups that appear in the news on issues related to those same policy areas. The investigation is based on data from Denmark and the United Kingdom. First, we use survey data to identify the policy areas in which groups actively lobby. Second, we identify groups' media appearances in news stories related to those same policy areas. Third, we compare diversity among the groups actively lobbying with the groups actually appearing in the news and investigate possible biases. We find that even when the analysis of media appearances is narrowed down to only those groups active in a policy area, the news media allow more access to well-resourced groups. However, in contrast to previous findings, differences in media appearances across interest group types are not reproduced. These results imply that media selection biases are mainly produced by varying lobbying resources rather than discrimination based on the type of interests that groups represent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The news media are frequently accused of portraying politics as a strategic game rather than focusing on political issues. However, the understanding of the prevalence of different news frames in the media coverage of politics is limited in several respects. This article seeks to contribute to remedying this by (1) conducting a longitudinal analysis of the use of different news frames during election periods as well as in everyday politics, (2) adopting an analytical framework including several different types of process focus, and (3) pointing to the importance of including political developments alongside changes in the media system when explaining developments in the news coverage of politics. The empirical analysis of twenty years of public radio news in Denmark confirms a long-term trend toward greater focus on electoral consequences in news stories in election periods; however, the trend is not mirrored in news stories when an election is not imminent. In explaining these findings, situational factors related to the political system and party politics must be included alongside explanations pointing toward an increasing professionalization of political parties as well as long-term changes in the media system and in party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]