Introduction

Mass media have taken on an increasingly influential role with respect to the design, implementation and critical evaluation of public policy. While media might only be one of many factors that influence policymakers’ decisions, they remain the public's largest source of information on public policy, and as such, they are the single largest catalogue of political information, covering everything from administrative proceedings, policy change, public opinion on policy matters, to policy scandals and overspending. By extension, media necessarily perform another function—relaying information between policymakers and the public. This places media in a number of critical roles: reflecting the policy process, as well as directly and indirectly influencing it.

As elsewhere, the challenge for Canadian scholars of public policy has been to distinguish when media are playing each of these roles and to what effect. Canada’s mainstream news media are known to be far more at arm’s-length from the policy process compared with the press in many other western democracies (Hallin & Mancini, 2004), but they still have ample opportunity to lead the charge for policy change. Certainly, the greatest difficulty for an outside observer is proving that the press have played a critical role in actually shaping or changing policy outcomes. However, there are countless cases in our collective political past—including the Sponsorship Scandal, the In-and-Out Scandal and the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women—where Canadians can point to media being a likely factor in influencing a change in political behaviour and public policy.

The plurality of media and the wide variety of policy areas that they cover make it difficult to point to a systematic relationship between policymakers and media. Yet most scholars of public policy accept that media can (and do) influence policy and public opinion toward policy (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993; Birkland, 2014; Howlett & Ramesh, 2003; Sabatier & Weible, 2014). This relationship, as difficult as it may be to tidily sum up, holds even in the face of some of the truisms that scholars have come to collectively accept about media such as: a) media outlets, editors and journalists have biases, preferences and ideological views that influence both the selection and framing of media stories (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009); b)