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News Coverage about Direct-Democratic Campaigns in a Period of Structural Crisis


 This article examines whether money talks in political campaign coverage. Analyzing news coverage about twenty-nine recent direct-democratic campaigns in Switzerland, it shows that votes involving expensive campaigns and populist proposals—and ideally both—correlate with high media attention. This favors especially Switzerland's largest party with the most resources, the right-wing populist Swiss People's Party (SVP). A case study of one vote on media policy confirms these patterns and shows that news coverage is also shaped by the vested (self-)interests of media organizations. The results imply that news media, affected by the crisis in journalism, fail to cover a truly wide diversity of actors and topics.