Regulation in the limelight: Analysing changes in media coverage of independent regulators in Britain

Regulatory decision-making by independent agencies tends to be portrayed as Pareto efficient and non-distributive. Accordingly, the independent regulators themselves are considered hardly newsworthy, attracting attention only when dealing with well-known companies. Yet, since the global financial crisis, the news media have paid more attention to regulators, with variation in coverage that is hard to explain by reference to the fame of their regulatees only. How can we account for the broader patterns and changes in coverage? To what extent is media coverage of regulators driven by the general state of the economy? Do observed regulatory outcomes play a role? And has the increased use public communication by regulators affected the coverage? In the proposed paper, I analyse newspaper articles on British economic regulators published in popular national newspapers between 1997 to 2020. I assess changes in volume, but also use quantitative text analysis to explore changes in tone, topic and politicisation. Thus, I aim to shed light on the political environment that technocratic bodies face, and the role of the media in scrutinising the activities of independent agencies.