The DC factor? Advocacy groups in the news

Abstract

This study examines dynamics among organized interests’ characteristics, the organizations’ strategic activities, and news coverage of organizations’ activities by incorporating theoretical perspectives from group politics and journalism. To examine the relationship among groups’ characteristics, strategic efforts, and news coverage (visibility and prominence), the study combines three large data sets: group profile data (208 US organizations based on the Internal Revenue Service data collected by the National Center for Charitable Statistics), telephone interviews with groups’ executive members (208 randomly sampled organizations nationwide), and content coding of newspaper articles that covered the same organizations (548 newspaper articles). Findings from this study show that the ‘DC factor’, that is, being located in Washington, DC, is consistently a significant factor in explaining the presence of groups in newspapers, even after controlling for group resources, including total revenue. The implications of the findings are discussed.