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One of the key democratic functions of the media is to provide people with the kind of information they need to be free and self-governing. This is equally important when it comes to the coverage of opinion polls. Thus far, there is however only limited research on the quality of the media’s coverage of opinion polls, including factors that might help to explain variation in the quality of opinion poll coverage. Against this background, the purpose of this study is (1) to investigate the extent to which news media take statistical uncertainties into account when covering opinion polls and making causal interpretations based on opinion polls, and (2) to explore some factors that might help to explain variation in the quality of opinion poll coverage. Among other things, the results show that journalists very often fail to take statistical uncertainties into account and that they, in about half of the cases, provide explanations for changes that are within the margin of error. The results also show that the...

In recent years, a number of studies have suggested a positive linkage between public service broadcasting and public knowledge about current affairs. Most studies are, however, based on aggregate, cross-sectional data. On the individual level they fall short of establishing any causal linkage between TV news exposure and public knowledge. In addition, studies which investigate whether the intensity of the political information environment matters for learning effects from watching TV news, are missing. Against this background, this study compares knowledge effects from watching public service and commercial TV news in three contexts that vary in the intensity of the political information environment: a national election campaign, a European parliamentary election campaign and a non-election period. Among other things, the results show stronger knowledge effects from watching public service than commercial TV news.

During the last decade, the concept of a mediatization of politics has become increasingly popular. A search in Google Scholar, for example, reveals that there were about 2000 citations in the year...

While there is a large body of research on news values and news selection, most research does not clearly distinguish between the concept of news and news selection, on the one hand, and news value ...

One of the key concepts related to the media's increasing political influence is mediatization. It has even been described as a meta-process, on a par with other social change processes such as globalization and individualization. Despite the fact that the concept has been used for several decades, it remains however a concept referred to more often than properly defined and used to guide systematic empirical research. Against this background and based on the conceptualization of mediatization as a multi-dimensional concept, the purpose of this article is to investigate perceptions of the media's political influence among members of parliament and political news journalists at major national and regional media in Sweden. The results show that both groups attribute great influence to the media, in particular TV, newspapers and radio, and that both groups perceive TV and radio as influential as even the prime minister in terms of how often they manage to place a new issue highest on the political agenda. Th...

According to previous research, two characteristics of online news as opposed to traditional news are interactivity and immediacy. However, most research in this area has focused on the news site-level of analysis, and there are only a few studies on how interactivity and immediacy affect online news on the news story-level of analysis. The main reason for this appears to be that the very nature of online news makes observation by traditional research methods, such as quantitative content analysis, problematic. Against this background, the overall purpose of this paper is to explore methodological approaches for the study of interactivity and immediacy on the news story-level of online news. The paper develops a three-pronged strategy for freezing the flow of online news to enable systematic content analyses of interactivity and immediacy, and tests this strategy in a comparative analysis of the online news sites Guardian.co.uk in Britain and Aftonbladet.se in Sweden.

The literature discussing the impact of media and journalism upon democracy, typically criticizes both media and journalism for their content and their negative effects on some aspects of democracy. In turn, this raises the question of identifying news standards by which the quality of news journalism might be evaluated. But neither the proposed news standards nor the criticism levelled against them specify with sufficient clarity the model of democracy to be used as a normative departure. This article argues that the question of proper news standards cannot be addressed in isolation from the question of different normative models of democracy. In order to discover news standards by which the quality of news journalism can or should be evaluated, it analyzes four normative models of democracy and their demands upon citizens: procedural democracy, competetive democracy, participatory democracy and deliberative democracy. Building upon that analysis, the article asks: What normative implications for media and news journalism follow from the distinctive perspectives of procedural, competitive, participatory and deliberative democracy?