Metropolitan areas are a typical and increasingly discussed example for fragmented governance lacking clear accountability structures. While most of the literature has focused on the legitimacy of institutions and actors so far, we add the communicational dimension of accountability. Comparing two types of metropolitan governance in four countries, we test an optimistic and a pessimistic hypothesis regarding media’s ability to compensate a lack of legitimacy. Optimistically, we argue that the media points out who is responsible for policy decisions and thus reduce the complexity of network governance and hold actors accountable. From a pessimistic perspective, we expect however that the media are biased in focusing only on elected actors that are more visible and thus easier to blame. Analysing newspaper content data, we come to a mixed conclusion. While elected and non-elected policy-actors are both visible in the media, elected actors are more often blamed than they are actually responsible. Unelected actors are not only outside of the chain of delegation in governance structures, they are also less in the focus of public control.
