Browsing by Author "Tikkanen, Jenni"

Lobbying means influencing political decision-making and is one of the ways organizations try to control changes in their operating environment. Efforts to influence through media publicity (that is, media lobbying) are a significant part of lobbying, and one that has professionalized and become more multi-faceted in the first two decades of the 21st century. The goal of this study is to find out how media publicity is used in lobbying and how important a tool it is to lobbyists. Research questions are approached through a case study dealing with the public debate about alcohol marketing regulation and interviews of lobbyists active in that debate. The case study presents two opposing parties: business life actors object to restrictions on alcohol marketing and health sector NGOs defend them. Two sets of data and methods are combined in this study. First the case study is examined with the help of media data. Then frame analysis is applied to find out what kind of an image is constructed of media lobbying by the media data. The other data of the study consists of lobbyist interviews. Content analysis is applied to find out which strategies and phenomena are emphasized when lobbyists talk about their work. Media lobbying is looked at from the perspective of the mediatization of politics where professionalization becomes a key concept. The results of the study show a field of lobbying that is multi-faceted and full of tensions. The public debate is dominated by conflict frame that is backed up by following subsidiary frames: the protective, freedom and economic frames. The analysis of the lobbyist interviews shows that lobbying environment has become harder to predict and control which makes new means of lobbying a necessity. Lobbyists consider media an important tool, nevertheless its role remains to support direct lobbying. Media lobbying aims at controlling the frames of the debate. Lobbyists try to control the public opinion on the issue and its perceived significance on the public agenda. They strive to define the problem and the actors operating around it. In the light of this study it is clear that lobbyists can have substantial power over the media publicity of different issues. In the 21st century, however, that power requires more and more professionalized resources. It is characteristic of media lobbying that publicity is used for constructing media images, truths and reputations in a provocative fashion. This trend of media lobbying can be called a transformation from high modern to liquid. As the conflict frame becomes stronger, chances of dialogue seem to diminish.