In the Eye of the Storm? A Quantitative Content Analysis on the Influence of Surrogate Inspectorates on Media Frames

In the past decades, scholars have provided novel insights on the role of media within regulation. Still, this strand of research has received less attention to the networked nature of contemporary regulatory governance. This article studies surrogate inspectorates, who focus on motivating the implementation/enforcement of regulatory rules, often temporary and without formal capacity. Based on a quantitative content analysis of 2700 newspaper articles, this article studies how the presence of surrogate inspectorates affects the way regulatory agencies are framed within newspaper articles. The results show that (a) media attention for regulatory agencies has increased in the past 12 years and is increasingly negative and (b) that the presence of surrogate inspectorates is associated with more sensational, personalized, conflict, and negative news coverage of regulatory agencies. This study concludes that, as the regulatory network becomes more complex with, for example, surrogate inspectorates, the control of regulatory agencies over media framing diminishes.