(1) The media pressure hypothesis
The intuitive interpretationwould be thatmediatization, as it denotes the increased power
of the media, means that organizations need to adapt in response. This would imply that
higher media pressure simply leads to stronger adaptations to themedia and, thus, to more
advanced states of (organizational) mediatization. In this perspective, organizations are
depicted as – more or less – unreflective and passive victims ofmediatization (Pfetsch and
Marcinkowski 2013; Fredriksson and Pallas 2014). Mediatization is then a reaction guided
by the perception ofmedia relevance (Donges and Jarren 2014, p. 188). Following this logic,
it would be sensible to ascribe variations in mediatization to variations in media pressure.
Government agencies that are more regularly scrutinized, portrayed, and criticized by the
media can be expected to have stronger incentives to adapt to the media. Support for the
notion of media coverage as driving adaptation to the media has been provided by, for
example, Deacon and Monk (2001) and Maggetti (2012).