Competing models of journalism? Political affairs coverage in U.S., British, German, Swiss, French and Italian newspapers

Abstract

A content analysis of 6525 randomly sampled political news stories from national, regional and weekly newspapers in six western countries between 1960 and today examines to which degree discursively defined reporting styles correspond to conceptual typologies of media systems and historical classifications of journalistic traditions. Univariate and multivariate analyses of three key indicators (opinion-orientation, objectivity, negativity) reveal three approaches to newsmaking: a US-led model of rational news analysis, an Italian-led model of polarized reporting, and a Germanic model of disseminating news with views. Merging a historically informed institutionalist approach with systematic content analysis, the study’s main contribution to comparative communication research is to clarify our understanding of divergent models of journalism, contextualize existing media-system typologies, and revise assumptions about the affiliation of individual systems to certain models.