Media Systems, News Content and Public Perception of Political Reality - A Cross-National Content Analysis, 2009

Public opinion constitutes one of the cornerstones of democracy. Citizens are assumed to hold preferences for particular polices, know where parties and candidates for office are located on the relevant policy dimensions, and cast their votes accordingly. In other words: Democracy functions best when its citizens are politically informed. In order to express attitudes and act according to their self-interest, citizens need relevant and up to date information about current affairs. In many respects, political relevant information is more widely available now than at any time in history. However, several scholars have questioned the quality and the form of information provided by the news media. A central hypothesis in this project is that media systems matter for the information available to the public. How commercial and public broadcasting is organised within a country, or the relative importance of newspapers to television, are all factors that can influence the information provided by the news media, and thus the potential effect on the public. The overall purpose of this project is to study the information given by the news media to the public, and how this information influences public's knowledge and perception of political reality.

This data set consist of a content analysis of news output in six countries: Norway, Sweden, Belgium, The Netherlands, UK and the US. The content analysis studies between and within country variations in news content, including important factors such as hard versus soft news, thematic versus episodic news frames, domestic versus international focus, use of actors and sources as well as main arguments presented on a few selected topics.