Search

The overall purpose of this article is to review theory and research on interpretive journalism, one of the key concepts in research on the style and character of news journalism. While it is often claimed that news journalism over recent decades has changed from being predominantly descriptive to becoming increasingly interpretive, our review suggests that there is a lack of systematic research in this area. The literature is furthermore characterized by different conceptualizations and operationalizations of interpretive journalism, as well as by different normative assumptions. Taken together, this suggests not only insufficient conceptual clarity, but also problems related to the comparability and cumulativity of findings. To remedy this, and based on our review of how interpretive journalism has been conceptualized and operationalized, this article suggests how interpretive journalism should be conceptualized and operationalized in order to increase conceptual clarity, comparability across studies, and ultimately research cumulativity. © SAGE Publications 2011.

A key concept in research on the media coverage of politics is the game or strategy frame. Contrasted with coverage of politics as issues, theframing of politics as a strategic game is marked by features such as winning and losing as the central concern and a focus on how candidates or parties are doing in opinion polls. The pervasiveness of such framing is, however, disputed since (1) the way in which the frames are conceptualized and operationalized differs significantly; and (2) while some use terms such as 'game frame' and 'strategy frame' as synonymous, others argue that there is a conceptual difference between them. Against this background, this article reviews research on the media's framing ofpolitics as a strategic game, what concepts have been used, and how they have been operationalized; and suggests a synthesis and ways of improving conceptual clarity and comparability in research on the media's use of strategy and/or game frames. © SAGE Publications 2011.

This study compares election news coverage in two different countries-Sweden and the United States, focusing on the use of the strategic game frame and the conflict frame and the association between these two frames and different types of news sources. The content analysis includes early evening newscasts from CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and ABC World News in the USA and Rapport, Aktuellt and TV4 Nyheterna inSweden. The findings show that the strategic game frame is used more frequently in the US coverage and is correlated with the use of media analysts and campaign operatives in both countries. Ordinary citizens as sources contribute to issue framing while domestic political actors tend to be associated with conflict framing. Differences in media framing between public and private media are also identified and discussed in the context of national political and media systems. © 2011 The Author(s).

Written by a leading team of internationally-distinguished political communication scholars, this book offers the most comprehensive account on comparative political communication research in the context of European Parliamentary elections to date. Divided into four sections, experts begin by tracing the historical and political background of European Parliamentary elections, paying close attention to trends in turnout and the changing institutional role of the European Parliament (EP). Focusing mainly on the 2009 elections and using original data throughout, the next two sections are devoted to campaign communication strategies and the overall media coverage of EP elections in both established and newly-accessioned members of the European Union. The concluding section focuses on the macro- and micro-level effects of European parliamentary campaigns in a comparative perspective to illustrate how campaign strategies and media coverage were received by voters in EU member states. This insightful account on the interaction between political actors, the media, and voters allows readers to develop a global understanding of political and media system interdependencies and on comparative political communication research more generally. Essential reading to students and scholars in political science, media studies, European politics, and political communication, as well as policy makers within the European Union.

Political Public Relations maps and defines this emerging field, bringing together scholars from various disciplines—political communication, public relations and political science—to explore the area in detail. The volume connects differing schools of thought, bringing together theoretical and empirical investigations, and defines a field that is becoming increasingly important and prominent. It offers an international orientation, as the field of political public relations must be studied in the context of various political and communication systems to be fully understood. As a singular contribution to scholarship in public relations and political communication, this work fills a significant gap in the existing literature, and is certain to influence future theory and research.

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 purpose of this study was to compare the predictive power of overall political news consumption and media-specific news consumption, on perceived issue salience across different media channels and media types in the context of the 2006 Swedish parliamentary election. Findings suggest that overall consumption of political news is significantly more important than consumption of specific media outlets in predicting changes in issue salience. Although the study demonstrates that the Swedish news media collectively can exert considerable agenda-setting influence over their audiences, it could, however, not find any consistent evidence of differences related to media channels or media types. The reasons for and implications of the results are discussed.

The objective of this article is to analyze the brand new political party Junilistan in the Swedish European Parliamentary election in 2004. The article discusses whether Junilistan can be characterized as a market-oriented party, to what extent the party implemented political marketing techniques, and how the electoral success of Junilistan can be explained. The results indicate that Junilistan can be described as a quasi-market-oriented party, in the sense that it was inspired by perceptions of unfulfilled voter needs. However, its electoral success should mainly be explained by other factors, such as the second-ranking nature of European Parliamentary elections and growing distrust of established parties in Sweden.

Det brukar sägas att valdagen är demokratins högtidsstund, men utan en intensiv valrörelse skulle valdagen förlora demokratisk betydelse. Demokratin förutsätter val, och val förutsätter valrörelser för att vara demokratiskt meningsfulla. I den här boken granskas därför den politiska kommunikationen i samband med den svenska valrörelsen 2006. De politiska partiernas kampanjstrategier och användning av professionella kommunikationsmetoder diskuteras, liksom genomslaget för partiernas politiska dagordningar i debatten. Vidare undersöks de ledande nationella mediernas bevakning av valrörelsen under de sista veckorna före valet och olika särdrag i den politiska journalistiken. Mediernas effekter i valrörelsen diskuteras också utifrån olika studier av den allmänna opinionen. Författarna tar upp de viktigaste trenderna i den politiska kommunikationen i valrörelsen, inte minst mot bakgrund av den snabba medieutvecklingen. Särskilt belyst blir frågan om vad förändringarna betyder för demokratins kvalitet i termer av fri opinionsbildning och fungerande offentlighet.

During the last few decades, political campaigns appear to have become increasingly professionalised. However, at present most of the evidence for the professionalisation of political campaigning comes from countries such as the United States and Britain, and there is less evidence with regard to countries with party-centred systems, proportional elections and multiple parties. Moreover, there is a noticeable lack of systematic and comparative research on the extent to which political campaigns have become professionalised. At present, the only theory of professionalised campaigning that has been operationalised to allow systematic comparisons is the party-centred theory of professionalised campaigning. However, so far it has only been applied once. Thus the usefulness and validity of the theory remains largely unclear. Against this background, the purpose of this study is to elaborate on the party-centred theory of professionalised campaigning, and to test this theory in the context of the 2006 Swedish election.

Two concepts that have been used to describe the changes with regards to media and politics during the last fifty years are the concepts of mediationand mediatiza- tion. However, both these concepts are used more often than they are properly defined.Moreover,there is a lack of analysis of the processof mediatization,although the concept as such denotes a process.Thus the purpose of this article is to ana- lyze the concepts of mediated and mediatized politics from a process-oriented per- spective.The article argues that mediatization is a multidimensional and inherently process-oriented concept and that it is possible to make a distinction between four phases of mediatization. Each of these phases is analyzed.The conclusion is that as politics becomes increasingly mediatized, the important question no longer is related to the independence of the media from politics and society.The important question becomes the independence of politics and society from the media.

This study investigated the framing of the Iraq War in the elite newspapers in Sweden and the USA during the offi cial war period, 20 March–1 May 2003. The content analysis revealed signifi cant cross-cultural differences in the framing of the war in terms of tone, frames and use of sources. The differences in framing were consistent with the characteristics of the national political environment and foreign policy stances in each country.