GOVERNMENT departments are spending tens of thousands of pounds hiring consultants to discover which journalists give them the most favourable and the most critical coverage.

The Department of Health published a league table yesterday of medical and political correspondents on its website detailing which journalists wrote positive, negative or neutral articles.

The tables, covering national and regional newspapers, also analyse the number of articles written by medical correspondents and the estimated readership of each article.

The breakdown that analyses coverage by newspaper and coverage by journalist will give Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, and her ministers useful information on where to focus their attention. Similarly, unhelpful journalists could be frozen out of briefings or put on press-office blacklists.

The breakdown also shows which spokesmen or spokeswomen are most often quoted in each story and the subject matter concerned. Millward Brown Precis, the media-placement consultant, has been commissioned by Ms Hewitt to provide monthly updates of media analysis, but the Department of Health published the figures from last December only yesterday. A six-month update is expected in the autumn.

The department spent about £200,000 on the analysis and a MORI survey on public attitudes to the NHS, although a breakdown of the cost was not available. The analysis suggests where stories will be read by the most people and which papers are likely to be the most critical of the Government. It also gives some indication of whether it is better to give a story to a medical journalist or to a political journalist to get the best chance of a pro-Government spin.

The analysis reveals what most government press officers would have been able to tell ministers without expensive research. The Daily Mail has the most impact on the public because of its large readership and it also has the greatest number of negative articles. The Sun provides similar impact but with a higher proportion of positive stories than the Daily Mail. The Times has relatively impartial coverage, with a greater proportion of neutral stories.

The Health Department is the first to publish its league tables, although this was done with no fanfare on an obscure part of its website in August.

Other government departments are understood to be planning similar exercises, although it is unclear how many have commissioned private consultants.

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