Political news journalism : Mediatization across three news reporting contexts

• Election coverage has a tendency to frame politics as a strategic game, to increase the role ofjournalists as interpreters of issues and events and to include a conflict frame, and thus indicatingincreased mediatization. However, political news research outside of the election indicates thatnews media are less independent from political actors. Drawing on literature on mediatization,media interventionism, political news journalism, news framing and source use, the purpose of thisarticle is to empirically investigate whether election coverage is representative of other politicaljournalism in terms of degree of mediatization. The study is based on a systematic comparisonof three content analyses using the same coding schedule and procedure from coverage of theFinancial Crisis 2008, the Election Campaign 2010 and routine political news coverage 2012in Sweden. The main conclusion from this study is that mediatization of media coverage issubstantially influenced by the specific context of the news.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Mediatization

media independence

political journalism

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)