Abstract
Pressure from the media affects the daily work of bureaucrats and induces ‘media stress’, with potentially critical effects on the quality of public policy. This article analyses how bureaucrats’ daily work has been adapted to the media (‘mediatised’) and
which groups of bureaucrats experience the most media-stress. Reporting the results of an original and large-scale survey (N=4,655) this article demonstrates that levels of media-stress vary among different groups of civil servants. In turn, its analysis suggests that media-stress is more
pronounced in the Netherlands than in Norway, is more concentrated in the lower rungs of administrative hierarchies and is related to media pressures on organisations. By untangling the underlying logic of mediatisation and the dynamics of media-stress, this article makes an important contribution
to extant scholarship and also provides a series of practical recommendations.