In recent years, many studies have abandoned the absolutistic view of politics being at the mercy of the media and have started to paint a more fine-grained picture of this reciprocal relationship. Building on findings previous findings from content analyses and surveys, the present study takes an experimental approach not commonly applied to studying elite behavior to disentangle how the media influence individual political actors. National-level politicians from two Western European countries judge fictional but realistic news reports embedded in a survey based as to whether those would trigger them to, firstly, react politically and, secondly, towards the media. Besides news report characteristics like the media outlet, this study will provide some evidence as to whether variables on the politician or on the party level have more influence on whether the media make it into politics.
