Time is of the Essence: A Longitudinal Study on Business Presence in Political News in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands

This paper analyses the presence of interest organizations in political news in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands between 1990 and 2017. Previous research on organized interests in the media revealed (1) a consistent overrepresentation of business interests across countries, but (2) also that this overrepresentation has decreased over time in a European context. However, these studies are snapshots of interest group patterns with either cross-country or longitudinal variation, and important players such as corporations have been largely excluded by European scholars. We argue that includi... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Aizenberg, Ellis
Hanegraaff, Marcel
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
Reihe/Periodikum: The International Journal of Press/Politics ; volume 25, issue 2, page 281-300 ; ISSN 1940-1612 1940-1620
Verlag/Hrsg.: SAGE Publications
Schlagwörter: Sociology and Political Science / Communication
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-26848272
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
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Link(s) : http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1940161219882814

This paper analyses the presence of interest organizations in political news in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands between 1990 and 2017. Previous research on organized interests in the media revealed (1) a consistent overrepresentation of business interests across countries, but (2) also that this overrepresentation has decreased over time in a European context. However, these studies are snapshots of interest group patterns with either cross-country or longitudinal variation, and important players such as corporations have been largely excluded by European scholars. We argue that including corporations affects previous conclusions as it reveals substantial differences across countries and an increasing role of business interests in the news. We use a data set of Dutch and British news articles, in which we identified 34,657 interest organizations. This endeavor highlights that the distribution of organized interests in the media is skewed toward business interests and has not become more diverse. This suggests that the important insider role of business interests translates to outsider venues, which tells us something about how the news media maintain these patterns through the construction of news stories. These findings interfere with ideas of representativeness and flourishing democracies with a diverse public debate in which many different voices are expressed.