https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699017702836 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 1–21 © 2017 AEJMC Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1077699017702836 jmcq.sagepub.com Article Who Gets Covered? Ideological Extremity and News Coverage of Members of the U.S. Congress, 1993 to 2013 Michael W. Wagner 1 and Mike Gruszczynski 2 Abstract Does the news media cover ideological extremists more than moderates? We combine a measure of members of Congress’ ideological extremity with a content analysis of how often lawmakers appear in the New York Times from the 103rd to the 112th Congresses and on CBS and NBC’s evening newscasts in the 112th Congress. We show that ideological extremity is positively related to political news coverage for members of the House of Representatives. Generally, ideological extremity is not related to the likelihood of coverage for senators. Finally, we show that extreme Republicans are more likely to earn media attention than extreme Democrats. Keywords political communication, polarization, gatekeeping, news reporting Journalism relies on the reporting of attributed opinions to present an immediate snap- shot of the verifiable truth to an audience (Gans, 1979). Citizens rely on news cover- age of lawmakers’ words and actions so that they can be held accountable for their actions. The power to select whose attributed opinions to include in political news coverage is a fundamental power that the media exercises as a political institution in the United States (Cook, 2005; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). 1 University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA 2 Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, TN, USA Corresponding Author: Michael W. Wagner, Louis A. Maier Faculty Fellow, Department of Political Science, School of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 5054 Vilas Hall, SJMC, 821 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706, USA. Email: mwagner8@wisc.edu 702836JMQ XX X 10.1177/1077699017702836Journalism & Mass Communication QuarterlyWagner and Gruszczynski research-article 2017