This article aims to draw attention to the rising influence of professional public relations on the process of national news production in Britain and to discuss how this influence is affecting existing media-source relations. It notes that a wide range of organizations have begun adopting public relations as a means of achieving particular goals through media coverage. At the same time media institutions, operating under tighter editorial budgets, have become more dependent on information supplied by external sources. The two trends have resulted in the sudden growth of the professional public relations sector and changes to existing patterns of source access. How such trends are affecting various sources in their attempts to gain and manage media access is the debate that therefore takes up most of this piece. Is public relations simply another means by which institutional and corporate organizations are managing to secure access advantages, or is it providing new means whereby non-official sources can gain media access which was hitherto denied them?

This essay discusses journalistÁsource relations but with an emphasis on how such relations influence the understanding and behaviour of politicians. It explores the issue through empirical work conducted at the site of the UK Parliament at Westminster. Findings are based on semistructured interviews with 60 Members of Parliament (MPs) and 20 national political journalists. The research findings initially confirmed many of the observations of earlier studies in the field. UK journalistÁsource relations still resemble Gans' (1979) original ''tug-of-war'' description of an evershifting power balance between the two sides. Such interactions, in turn, are reflected in more compliant or adversarial news coverage. Of greater interest here, the interviews also revealed that such relations have come to play a significant role in the micro-level politics of the political sphere itself. This is because reporterÁpolitician relations and objectives have become institutionalised, intense and subject to a form of ''mediated reflexivity''. Consequently, politicians have come to incorporate such reporter interactions into their daily thinking and behaviour. As such, journalists are seen as more than a simple means of message promotion to the public. They also act, often inadvertently, as information intermediaries and sources for politicians trying to gauge daily developments within their own political arena.

This article makes the case that critical research in media studies needs to devote more attention to the part played by media and culture in elite decision-making. It argues that the mass media/mass influence paradigm is, of itself, no longer adequate to explain the utility of communications in the sustenance of unequal power relations in society. Instead, evidence presented here observes that a major function of news media is to act as a communications forum for elites in their daily conflicts and negotiations. With elites acting as sources, targets and major recipients of news texts, inter-elite, rather than elite-mass, communications seems to be a key feature of the political process. These findings are based on a series of 98 semi-structured interviews with political and corporate news sources, and senior journalists in the UK.

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