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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).

Although mediatization as a term is commonly used in the academic literature, it is rarely defined well and there are almost no studies that explicitly seek to investigate the mediatization of politics. Drawing on the literature on mediatization, media interventionism, political news journalism and related areas, the purpose of this article is to develop indicators of the degree to which news content is mediatized, and test these in a comparative content analysis of how Swedish and US television news covered the 2006 Swedish and 2008 US election campaigns. The results show that election news on US television is more mediatized than that on Swedish television, as expected. However, few differences were found across commercial and public service television news within Sweden. The study also suggests that the mediatization of news content may be moderated by national journalism cultures, political news cultures and political communication cultures.

While there is scholarly consensus regarding the importance of news sources, there are rather few comparative studies on how the media use sources. In addition, most of these focus mostly on the coverage of specific events, and are primarily based on print media. To go beyond these limitations and test the conditionality of source use, this study compares the use of sources in routine news coverage in television news in the United States and Sweden. The results show several differences in source use in Swedish and U.S. television news, but also a more complicated pattern of source use than anticipated. Most importantly, the results point towards the conditionality of source use depending on the type of news story and topic covered. The study warns against tendencies to generalize too far from single country-studies on source use or from comparative studies that are based on the media coverage of specific events or a single medium only.

The purpose of this study is to explore structural differences in television news format and news framing between the United States and Sweden. The study focuses on the top three television networks in the United States and the top two public service channels and the leading commercial television channels in Sweden: CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and ABC World News, and Rapport, Aktuellt and TV4 Nyheterna, respecively. The results of the content analysis reveal significant differences between the two countries across a number of important variables: amount of domestic versus foreign news coverage, level of journalistic visibility, length of politician’s sound bites, attribution of responsibility, and thematic versus episodic framing of the news. The discussion addresses the possible causes for these cross-cultural differences as well as the potential implications for news audiences in both countries.

Even though we live a global world cross-cultural comparisons of journalism practice remain rare. This study analyzed the use of sources in newspaper coverage in Sweden and the United States. Rather than focusing on one single event, the comparison utilizes data from three different events: the 2003 Iraq War, the 2002 national election in Sweden and the 2004 presidential election in the United States, and the 2005/2006 international controversy stemming from the publication of the Mohammad Cartoons. Some patterns across the three events emerged for the use of government officials, academic experts and citizens as sources but not for other types of sources. The findings are discussed in the context of news reporting and journalism within a distinct national political and media system.

This study compares the news coverage of election campaigns in three Swedish newspapers at the time of the 2002 national election and three U.S. newspapers at the time of the 2004 presidential election. The results from the content analysis show that the metaframe of politics as a strategic game was more common in the U.S. newspapers, while the metaframe of politics as issues was more common in the Swedish newspapers. U.S. articles were also more likely to use the horse-race and political strategy frames. While U.S. coverage was predominantly descriptive in focus, an interpretive journalistic style was more often dominant in the Swedish articles. The results also show that the U.S. news stories were triggered by the words and actions of the campaigns more often than the Swedish news stories., VR-Humanities