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What the picker changes
  • Top topics digest — the cards score the selected period against the prior 4 weeks.
  • 12-week heatmap & outlet matrix — show the 12 weeks ending at the selected week (they slide back with the picker, they aren’t a fixed snapshot).
  • Per-topic volume / alias drift — same 12-week trailing window, anchored on the selected period.
  • Coverage gap quadrant — scores the selected period against the 12 weeks before it (not including it).
  • Anomaly cards — only show alerts the detector fired during the selected period. Quiet weeks legitimately show none.
What stays as-is
  • Outlet orientation strip / lean colours — context-only, drawn from the last 12 weeks of activity regardless.
  • Co-occurrence graph — recent-activity anchored, not picker-driven.
  • Source & topic profiles — all-time data for the topic; the picker doesn’t affect them.
Rolling 7 days is a sliding live window for “current vibes”; switch to Weekly to compare specific weeks side-by-side.
Week of 31 Aug 2026
This week
Topic

Revolving Door Politics

14 items · 11 aliases · peaked week of 30 Aug 2026 · first seen 29 Apr 2026

The movement of individuals between senior roles in government, the public service, or politics and positions in the private sector, lobbying, or industries they formerly regulated, raising concerns about conflicts of interest and undue corporate influence over policy.

The stories behind this signal

across press, releases & commentary · links open at the source

Stance breakdown Methodology →

How the framings classify across 8 articles. Each framing is labelled by a small AI stance classifier; see the methodology page for details.

88%
13%
Critical 7 Neutral / explainer 1

Sample framings

Up to 12 framings across outlets and orientations — each a short phrase the extractor generated to characterise the piece's editorial angle (not a quote). Filter by lean to see how each bloc is spinning the story; click through to read the original.

a systemic risk of bias and influence in policy-making

Democracy Briefing: LobbyistWatch – September 2026
2 Sep
the-kaka Centre-left

opaque power shifts between public and private sectors

When a lobbyist jumps the species barrier into journalism
15 Jun
+6 more framings Create a free account to see them all →

Influence organisations active on this topic

Lobby groups, unions, think tanks and industry bodies whose own releases or whose people’s media appearances touched this topic over the last 12 months. Owned = their own press releases; earned = their people quoted across radio, press & commentary. A card carried in both — with the release coming first — is the agenda-setting signal. Co-occurrence isn’t proof a group drove the coverage.

The New Zealand Initiative
2 mentions
Think tank right Earned · 2

political appointees bring think tank biases into power

Volume by source orientation Methodology →

Stacked weekly counts; colour by lean. “n/a” covers government and iwi-Māori sources where lean isn't applicable.

Alias drift

How this topic has been named, week by week. A new alias winning out is usually a framing shift.

Free account Watch this topic with a free account — get alerted when framing shifts, when an MP adopts new language, or when discourse and press diverge. Create a free account Log in

How the public reacted

Social-media signal on the same topic, drawn from the social lens. Engagement is likes + 2×shares + 3×replies, the same weighting used across the digest cards. View on /social →

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