This study examines how mainstream media outlets covered intense negative emotions expressed during Greek parliamentary sessions between 2010 and 2022, a period marked by overlapping crises. We analysed a dataset comprising over 2500 parliamentary plenary sessions and more than 110,000 opinion articles from three ideologically diverse newspapers: Kathimerini, EFSYN and VIMA. Using Pearson correlations and lagged regression, we traced how these emotions moved through media coverage over time. We treated each media outlet as an emotional filter, focusing on how these outlets chose to engage with emotional content rather than on readership figures. In every case, anger was the emotion that was most clearly transmitted from Parliament to the press. It appeared regularly in all newspapers, surfacing two to three days after first appearing in political discourse. Fear surfaced sporadically, usually during significant events. Resentment was mostly absent, especially in VIMA. Contrary to expectation, it was not the more partisan newspapers that amplified anger the most, but Kathimerini—a mainstream, centre-right outlet—challenging the assumption that emotional polarisation is mostly driven by fringe or highly ideological media. These findings introduce two concepts: ‘temporal gatekeeping’, where the timing of events affects whether or not they are covered by the media, and ‘emotion-specific selectivity’, where some emotions are covered more easily than others. We see that the media are not simply passing along political emotion. They decide what to amplify and what to hold back, and when to do both. These choices shape not only what people feel in response to political events, but also when and how they feel it.