Corporate actors in Western European television news

News about corporations can be understood as an interdependent relationship among the
public relations function, organizational logic and the logic of the media. This research
addresses the visibility and role of corporate actors in Western European public television
news. A quantitative content analysis was conducted of a representative sample of
six primetime news programs (N= 139) in 2006. The results show that corporate actors do
not appear very often in the news, that they are part of a civil-economic coalition and join
the public debate about issues. Promotion of products, brands and organizations is hardly
visible.