Abstract
Among well-documented factors that shape political news coverage are reliance on official sources, indexing of coverage to the range of opinion among officials, and privileging of “episodes” over “themes.” The Downing Street Memo controversy of 2005 embodies a clash among those media agenda-setting factors and the intense desire of Internet activists to bring coverage to an issue that most political and media elites initially ignored. This case study analyzes the brief burst of mainstream coverage of the controversy. While straight news and television coverage was pegged mostly to official words and action, activists apparently had an easier time penetrating the op-ed pages of major newspapers.
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