How Ordinary MPs Can Make it Into the News: A Factorial Survey Experiment with Political Journalists to Explain the Newsworthiness of MPs

Abstract

Parliamentarians have to compete against each other to make it into the news, and some of them succeed more than others. Based upon news value theory, I consider MPs’ characteristics as news factors to explain their newsworthiness. I take an innovative approach by conducting a factorial survey experiment with political journalists. This allows me to study first which MPs are considered newsworthy and second whether journalists judge MPs’ newsworthiness regardless of their own personal background. In total, 73 Belgian journalists each judged 8 fictional press releases in which we carefully manipulated 4 characteristics of the MP sending it: party affiliation, issue specialization, media reactivity, and political action. Results show that parliamentarians from larger parties, those who react on mediatized issues, and those who communicate about their bill proposals are more newsworthy. Journalists’ judgments do not differ according to their gender, age, education, or political leaning.

Notes

¹ We refer to relevance as defined by O’Neill and Harcup (2009, p. 168): stories about issues, groups, and nations perceived to be relevant to the audience. In our case, this implies MPs who are more relevant actors in Belgian politics as seen by the audience (e.g., because they are an expert on the topic, or because they belong to a powerful party).

² Wouter Devriendt, Meyrem Almaci (Greens); Renaat Landuyt, Caroline Gennez (Socialists); Mathias De Clercq, Carina Van Cauter (Liberals); Theo Francken, Sarah Smeyers (Flemish Nationalists).

³ Specialization was based on interviews with federal MPs, with the support of the European Research Council (Advanced Grant ‘INFOPOL’, N° 295735) and of the Research Fund of the University of Antwerp (Grant N° 26827). We selected four generalist MPs and four MPs with a clear specialization: Devriendt – defense, Almaci – fiscality, Landuyt – judiciary, Francken – migration and defense.

⁴ In the follow-up questions, we asked journalists which parties they link to certain issues. They indeed connect some parties to the issues in the vignettes. Consequently, we tested whether the nonsignificant effect of specialization could be explained by their perceptions of party issue ownership. This appears to be not the case, as the effect of issue ownership on selection is insignificant (B = 0.14, SD = 0.18, p = .449).

⁵ The lack of interaction effects might be caused by the rather small cell sizes.

⁶ Next to individual features of journalists, we also looked at the level of the news organization to examine whether journalists working for other media outlets select differently. Similar to the personal features, they do not yield a significant result (B = –0.31, SD = 0.27, p = .26).

⁷ Unfortunately, we did not measure respondents’ knowledge about the issue specialization of MPs, so we cannot control for it.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Debby Vos

Debby Vos (Ph.D., University of Antwerp, 2015) is a guest professor and postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science, Media, Movements & Politics at the University of Antwerp. Her research interests include political communication, political news, and the relation between media and politics.