Political Issue Cycles in Lithuanian News Media

In the public domain, policy issues undergo specific life cycles where they progress from obscurity and limited debate to gaining increased public awareness and, eventually, to becoming institutionalized policy decisions, as they gradually fade away from the focus of the media. This process is accompanied by public debates in a diverse array of news outlets, by a variety of actors and is thus framed in a dynamic and shifting fashion. Such life cycles of policy issues in news media have been broadly studied internationally, especially in the US, but also in the Western Europe. Yet there are still relatively few studies on policy issue cycles in Central and Eastern European media. This presentation introduces a research project, titled Policy Issue Life Cycles in Lithuanian Media (CYCLE), funded by the Research Council of Lithuania (grant no. P-MIP-20-14). This is the first study of this kind on the Lithuanian case. It analyses and compares five policy issues that had gained resonance and waned into obscurity within the Lithuanian public domain since 2016. The project is set to analyse the emergence, rise, and decay of these policy issues over several different media. In doing so, it is set to uncover tendencies of policy reporting in the Lithuanian media, and to establish a comparative precedent for further study in the field. To this end, the project brings together different theoretical approaches to researching the interactions between news media and policymaking. The theoretical model incorporates broadly used research approaches, such as Framing and Agenda Setting, with some of the less widely used ones, such as Political Issue Cycles, and research on Media Hypes and News Fatigue. In addition, it adapts these theories to fit the Lithuanian case and discusses the general methodological choices made during the creation of the theoretical framework. It also discusses the preliminary results and future prospects of the project.