Abstract

This article analyses newspaper coverage of 95 interest groups operating in 7 different policy sectors in the three main Italian newspapers between 1992 and 2011. Results show that (1) newspapers' attention to interest groups increased between 1996 and 2006, but then declined to levels comparable to the early 1990s; (2) the visibility of interest groups varies according to their policy sectors, organizational characteristics, relevance, and communicative capacity; (3) large inequalities exist between groups operating in the same sector; and (4) newspapers' political orientations do not strongly affect the amount of coverage each group obtained, apart from the fact that "Il Sole-24 Ore", being a financial newspaper, tends to focus more specifically on some policies and to devote more attention to groups that have more resources.