Barrier or Benefit? How the Positional Alignment of Interest Groups with Public Opinion Leads to Media Attention

Policymakers perceive the news media as an important source of information on prevailing problems in society, public opinion, and the policy views of various stakeholders. Seeking media attention is thus a valuable strategy for interest groups that wish to exert influence on public policy. Previous studies have mainly stressed organisational characteristics to explain media attention. This paper proposes that the positional alignment of interest groups with public opinion is important to explain media attention. Specifically, I hypothesize the level of public salience and the degree of public support interest groups enjoy for their policy positions affects media attention. I test these expectations by analysing 192 Belgian interest groups making media claims on 61 policy issues. The findings indicate that interest groups enjoying widespread public support are more likely to appear at least one time in the news when issue salience is higher. However, the small subset of interest groups gaining sustained news coverage on a concrete policy issue, are also often found to lack broad public support.