Pulling a rabbit out of a hat: News agency’s agenda-setting power in Latvia

This research paper looks at how Latvian News Agency (LETA), the only national news agency in Latvia, affects the coverage of national news. The purpose of this study is to examine the phenomenon of ‘churnalism’ in the online news media, with a focus on one of the most significant state-level reforms, the administrative territorial reform, which came into force on July 1, 2021. Cosine similarity and the Levenshtein index were used as metrics in natural language processing to evaluate the degree to which online news media depend on the content of the news agency and to examine the level of originality in online news articles. The study reveals that the news agency serves as the catalyst for 47% of online news media articles. Moreover, 37% of news websites’ content is almost verbatim produced by the news agency. In-depth interviews (n = 4) with editors-in-chief of leading media outlets and LETA confirm that, due to limited alternatives and resource constraints, reliance on the agency is not only habitual but structurally embedded. These patterns suggest a heavy dependency on a single source which poses risks to media diversity, editorial independence, and ultimately the democratic quality of the public sphere.