From Light Breeze to Hurricane: The Political Contingency of Media Storms

Based on the expectation that instances of extreme news attention constitute the strongest opportunities for media influence on politics, research on so-called “media storms” have begun attracting interest in recent years. Media storms, hypes or waves, are characterized by an explosive increase in news coverage for a specific issue, constituting a substantial share of the news agenda over a certain period of time (Boydstun et al 2012). The increase is normally attributed to a key or trigger event (Vasterman 2005; Wien and Elmelund-Præstekær 2009), which satisfies news value criteria like conflict, sensation and relevance to the audience.

So far, the role of political actors in media storms remains largely unexplored. Taking as our starting point the political contingency of the mass media’s agenda-setting influence (cf. Walgrave and Van Aelst 2006; Green-Pedersen and Stubager 2010), we investigate the role of political actors and political logics in the development of media storms. Using a comprehensive data set based on nearly 200.000 radio news items from 1984-2003 in Denmark, we identify key/trigger events attracting strong initial attention in the news. We then go on to analyze how political logics (ie. party involvement, party competition, policy responsibility), in combination with media logics (ie. initial salience, issue type, scandal), affect the duration and intensity of news coverage.