Are governments having a harder time influencing the coverage of policymaking?

A growing literature is arguing that classical government advantages in political communication are fading. Gatekeeping and indexing are said to diminish, even if governments remain a privileged source of information for journalists and stakeholders. The "hybrid" media system is more dispersed and therefore much less likely to facilitate government preeminence. Relatedly, this more dispersed attention is also likely to focus more on possible dysfunctions, policy failures or crises. While many observers will share these statements, empirical evidence to back it is scarce and hard to get by. This paper puts forth a methodology to explore government discourse on policy as well as discourse on policy in general. It uses state-of-the art textmining techniques to track policy coverage in print media to test those techniques. I test this method on a sample of French print media outlets going back to the early eighties. While the main goal of this contribution is essentially descriptive, it provides insights into why and how governments may lose control over the coverage of certain issues rather than others.