Balanced or Biased? Interest Groups and Legislative Lobbying in the European News Media

This paper examines the coverage of legislative lobbying by organized interests in European news media. Thereby, our central research question is whether this coverage can be considered as biased or rather balanced. Our starting point is that lobbying in an increasingly crowded EU-level interest community is not only a struggle for access but also for media attention. A systematic analysis of how lobbying is covered offers various valuable insights into the European influence production process. In this regard, media attention is a key resource for organized interests and, as most resources, this commodity is not distributed equally. However, while the aggregate levels of attention may look balanced, attention may vary depending on the legislative proposal that is at stake. Some types of interests gain substantial attention, while others are much less prominent. For a set of 21 salient legislative proposals adopted by the European Commission, we empirically identified which interest groups gained media attention and how much. Controlling for issue characteristics, our findings suggest that next to organizational resources, preferences of organized interests are an essential ingredient for capturing group balance in the news media