Digital Media Detection System for Interest Groups in the European Union

Interest groups are pivotal in shaping public opinion and influencing policy decisions across the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom. In addition to traditional lobbying strategies that involve direct engagement with policymakers, many groups employ outside lobbying strategies to sway public opinion and exert indirect pressure on decision-makers. This study introduces an innovative detection system that monitors real-time references to registered interest groups from the European Transparency Register across media outlets in all 27 EU member states and the UK. By systematically tracking organisations listed in the register, the system focuses on their visibility in the ten most widely read newspapers in each country. The system operates as a ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) framework, designed to automate the continuous extraction of articles from selected media outlets. It incorporates manual annotations and predefined conditions to improve detection accuracy. During the transformation phase, advanced preprocessing and text-matching techniques are employed to identify mentions of registered interest groups using official names, aliases, and related terms. Manual oversight further refines this process, addressing linguistic and contextual nuances across different languages and regions. A key outcome of this project is the creation of the first dedicated database on European media coverage of interest groups. This database will house articles collected from targeted newspapers and include structured records of detected mentions, categorised by attributes such as country, media outlet, title, author, corpus, and date. This resource will facilitate cross-national analyses of how interest groups are portrayed within media ecosystems, offering insights into patterns of visibility and engagement across Europe. The inclusion of outside lobbying as a conceptual framework highlights how interest groups leverage the media to shape public narratives, garner public support, and exert indirect influence on policymakers. By focusing on the most influential media outlets in each country, the system ensures a targeted yet scalable approach to understanding the representation of interest groups in European media. The flexible ETL framework, complemented by manual intervention, provides adaptability to multilingual and diverse media contexts, ensuring precision and relevance. This detection system bridges the gap between transparency initiatives and media monitoring, offering a unique tool to track registered interest groups in prominent news outlets. The resulting database will not only enhance research capabilities but also support policymakers, and promote greater transparency and accountability by illuminating how interest groups engage with public discourse through the media and outside lobbying strategies