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Scholars have been increasingly concerned with portrayals of terrorism in mainstream and alternative media outlets following the September I I and subsequent terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom and Spain. Communication researchers have examined public response and reaction to terrorist attacks, definitions of terrorism, policy questions, media portrayals of terrorism, and framing across different media and nations.This study undertakes a comparative framing analysis of media coverage of terrorism, as reported by prominent U.S. and U.K. newspapers, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. Findings revealed that the U.S. papers engaged in more episodic coverage and the U.K. papers in more thematic coverage of terrorism and terrorism-related events. The U.S. papers were consumed with presenting news associated with the military approach, whereas the U.K. papers were oriented toward diplomatic evaluations of terrorist events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the presence of interest organizations in political news in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands between 1990 and 2017. Previous research on organized interests in the media revealed (1) a consistent overrepresentation of business interests across countries, but (2) also that this overrepresentation has decreased over time in a European context. However, these studies are snapshots of interest group patterns with either cross-country or longitudinal variation, and important players such as corporations have been largely excluded by European scholars. We argue that including corporations affects previous conclusions as it reveals substantial differences across countries and an increasing role of business interests in the news. We use a data set of Dutch and British news articles, in which we identified 34,657 interest organizations. This endeavor highlights that the distribution of organized interests in the media is skewed toward business interests and has not become more diverse. This suggests that the important insider role of business interests translates to outsider venues, which tells us something about how the news media maintain these patterns through the construction of news stories. These findings interfere with ideas of representativeness and flourishing democracies with a diverse public debate in which many different voices are expressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally, scholars have raised substantial concerns regarding unfavorable news coverage of female political candidates and representatives. However, prior research has scarcely considered the intersectional effects of political actors’ race and gender in this context. I investigate these dynamics through a case study of the U.K. 2010 general election, a breakthrough year for black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) women in British politics. Only three had previously been elected to parliament but a further seven joined their ranks that year. While headlines celebrated the possibility of a “small revolution” resulting in “the most diverse parliament ever,” the press also subjected BAME female candidates to exceptional scrutiny regarding their credentials and ability to “transform politics.” Employing a quantitative content analysis of national newspaper coverage, I find that the apparent newsworthiness of BAME women’s intersectional identity was a double-edged sword. While they arguably enjoyed a visibility advantage compared with white female candidates, their coverage was also exceptionally negative and narrowly focused on their ethnicity and gender. I argue that as national legislatures become increasingly diverse, single axis analyses of the effects of politicians’ race, gender, or other axes of identity are insufficient to capture their combined effects on press coverage of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the months leading up to the 2010 British General Election, pundits were claiming that women would be specifically targeted by all political parties. However, this focus never materialized and it was just more business as usual but with the added novelty of televised leaders’ debates, which meant that coverage was more male ordered than ever. The study on which this article is based monitored articles published in the four weeks leading up to election day across twelve newspapers, comprising a mix of dailies and weekend editions, broadsheets and midmarket, and tabloid titles. The study concentrated on articles that had the election as the main story and which mentioned or sourced one or more candidates, both MPs seeking reelection, and Parliamentary Candidates. We were interested in exploring (any) differences in the news coverage of women and men candidates, looking at both frequency and content. Our findings suggest that women were much less likely to feature in news stories than men, even when controlling for Party Leader coverage. Women were much more likely to be mentioned or quoted in feature articles focused explicitly on gender issues, made interesting because of their sex and couture rather than their political abilities and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]