Significant progress has been made in mapping the media efforts as well as the media coverage of policy advocates such as interest groups, think tanks and private corporations. However, less attention has been devoted to connecting media efforts to media coverage. In this research note, we therefore ask: To what extent do the media-targeted activities of policy advocates actually influence the news? In a first analytic step, we use three different methods to assess whether interest groups influence the news: automated identification based on anti-plagiarism software, computer-assisted topic modelling and manual word search. Based on the results of this first analysis, we use manual word search to identify possible media effects of a larger sample of all press releases issued by five major Danish interest groups in 2018. We conclude that the press releases issued by interest groups have very little—and most often no—direct influence on the news.