Over-responsibilised and over-blamed: elected actors in media reporting on network governance. A comparative analysis in eight European metropolitan areas
研究媒体如何报道治理网络中的政策参与者，发现选举官员被媒体过度赋予责任和指责，而非选举官员的可见度较低，且这种偏见受商业压力影响。
This article contributes to the study of democratic problems related to governance networks, by focusing on the role of the media. Two main rivalling hypotheses are examined. The functionalist hypothesis postulates that the media accurately inform the public about policy actors and their responsibilities, independent of these actors’ institutional status. The media-bias hypothesis postulates an attention bias towards elected policy actors, resulting in reduced public visibility of non-elected policy actors. The analysis uses standardised data on decision-making processes and newspaper content relating to public transport and economic promotion policies in eight western European metropolitan areas. Findings are that the actor mix of governance networks is quite accurately reflected in newspaper reporting. However, elected actors are more often presented as responsible for policies (‘over-responsibilised’), and they are more often blamed for policy failures than other actors (‘over-blamed’). The extent of this media bias depends on commercial pressure on media outlets. We also show that variations of this general pattern are linked to different types of media systems found across the cases under scrutiny.