What Makes it into the Media? Party Messages, Communication Channels, and Media Outlets

Media coverage of political actors and debates is a crucial avenue for voters to learn about political parties and their policies. However, nowadays party-media agenda-setting is increasingly shaped by large-scale transformations and the fragmentation of political communication across various party channels (e.g., press releases, social media, speeches) and media types (e.g., newspapers, television, online news), potentially affecting the provision of political information. This article examines these dynamics using large-scale textual data from political parties (n = 17,677) and media outlets (n = 90,531) published in the run-up to the Austrian national election in 2019. Building on the measurement of text similarity with state-of-the-art transformer-based models and multiverse analysis, we investigate the success of party messages from press releases, parliamentary speeches, Facebook and Twitter making it into important national newspapers, online news sites as well as television and radio news programs. The article shows that the variety in party channels and media outlets—with their distinct characteristics, modalities, and (technological) affordances—create different flows of information between the parties and the media. Press releases remain crucial tools for parties to get their messages into the media, while social media and parliamentary speeches also matter, albeit with varying effects by party. We also find that online news is more receptive to party messages than print, television, or radio news. Despite these differences, journalistic gate-keeping consistently favors large and government parties across all media types. These findings underscore the need for nuanced research into the interaction between party communication channels and media outlets in contemporary democracies.