Dominating the news: government officials in front-page news coverage of policy issues in the United States and Korea

What determines which political actors dominate a country’s news? Understanding the forces that shape political actors’ news coverage matters, because these actors can influence which problems and alternatives receive a nation’s public and policy attention. Across free-press nations, the degree of media attention actors receive is rarely proportional to their degree of participation in the policymaking process. Yet, the nature of this “mis”-representation varies by country. We argue that journalistic operating procedures – namely, journalists’ incentive-driven relationships with government officials – help explain cross-national variance in actors’ media representation relative to policymaking participation. We examine two free-press countries with dramatically different journalistic procedures: United States and Korea. For each, we compare actors’ policymaking participation to news coverage (using all 2008 New York Times and Hankyoreh Daily front-page stories). Although exhibiting greater general discrepancy between actors’ policymaking and media representation, diverse actors are over-represented in United States news; in Korea, governmental actors are dominant.