News media lobbying as a conduit for parliamentary attention

This study investigates the impact of news media lobbying on parliamentary attention. Specifically, it explores whether Flemish members of parliament react to issues addressed in news media lobbying in oral questions and interpellations. The research utilizes two longitudinal datasets covering the period from 2003 to 2022. The first dataset comprises a content analysis of Flemish television news since 2003 (Electronic News Archive). This dataset gauges news media lobbying on the issue level as it records which actors speak in the news. The second dataset includes all oral questions and interpellations asked in the Flemish Parliament during the relevant period, retrieved using the flempar R-package to query the API of the Parliament. The study then captures attention through an issue coding following the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) framework. The study also examines whether political parties react differently to news media lobbying. As such, this study contributes to interest group literature in examining the impact of groups’ media prominence on parliamentary agenda-setting, contingent on party characteristics.