Inka Salovaara-Moring

Media System, Public Knowledge and Democracy A Comparative Study

■ This article addresses the implications of the movement towards entertainment-centred, market-driven media by comparing what is reported and what the public knows in four countries with different media systems. The different systems are public service (Denmark and Finland), a `dual model (UK) and the market model (US). The comparison shows that public service television devotes more attention to public affairs and international news, and fosters greater knowledge in these areas, than the market model. Public service television also gives greater prominence to news, encourages higher levels of news consumption and contributes to a smaller within-nation knowledge gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged. But wider processes in society take precedence over the organization of the media in determining how much people know about public life. ■

Cross‐National versus Individual‐Level Differences in Political Information: A Media Systems Perspective

Abstract We propose a context‐dependent approach to the study of political information. Combining a content analysis of broadcast news with a national survey measuring public awareness of various events, issues, and individuals in the news, we show that properties of national media systems influence both the supply of news and citizens’ awareness of events in the news. Public service‐oriented media systems deliver hard news more frequently than market‐based systems. It follows that for citizens living under public service regimes, the opportunity costs of exposure to hard news are significantly lowered. Lowered costs allow less interested citizens to acquire political knowledge. Our analyses demonstrate that the knowledge gap between the more and less interested is widest in the US and smallest in Scandinavia.

Crime, foreigners and hard news: A cross-national comparison of reporting and public perception

The Finnish media devote more attention to hard news than the British media, yet Finns are less interested in politics than the British. The principal reason for this difference in news values is that Finnish TV is more subject to public service influence than British TV, and the Finnish press is more strongly influenced by a professional journalistic culture than its British counterpart. While a number of national differences contribute to different levels of public knowledge, the Finns are better informed about hard news topics partly because they are better briefed in these areas by their media.

Dead Ground: Time-Spaces of Conflict, News, and Cultural Understanding

Slogans like “geography matters” or “space makes a difference” are often repeated but in media studies there have been few efforts to go deeper into these concepts and to systematically explore what kind of geography could matter when we talk about conflict and war reporting. This article introduces the concept of “dead ground,” which refers to hidden cultural time-spaces where the cultural faultlines of conflicts are located. It explores cultural “dead grounds” within reporting on armed conflict in post-Soviet Georgia. It also analyses three different elements of dead ground by comparing local and news discourses on the conflict. Empirically, it explores the war between Russia and Georgia through interviews with local journalists, foreign correspondents, and international observers. The article shows that in order to move beyond “dead ground,” conflict reporting should advance towards anthropological reflexivity on how the spatio-temporal context defines a cultural understanding of conflict.

Geographies of media and power: The United States in Finnish media discourse, 1984-2009

•This article explores the representation of the United States in Finnish daily newspapers, 1984—2009. Empirically, it builds on an analysis of editorials and commentaries that focus on US foreign policy. The examples deal with the deployment of US nuclear missiles to Europe in 1984, the Balkans war in 1994, the continuation of the war in Iraq in 2004, and the Cairo speech of newly elected President Barack Obama in 2009. Theoretically, the article reflects on discourses through the geographies of power politics and identity organized by the media of the small borderland country, Finland, at the ideological, economic and cultural-interactional levels. The focal questions are how the frontiers and contours of the evolving geopolitical positions of the United States were articulated, and how territorial units were defined in the spatial and symbolic practices of the commentators. In these discourses, ‘USA’ is constructed through three successive narratives: (a) as a ‘superpower’ in relation to the Soviet Union/Europe, in which new identities are depicted as part of differing positions in power geographies; (b) ‘America’ as an ideological space where the main organizing principles are ‘American’ values and moralities in relation to changing economic and political geographies; and (c) a territorial order of geo-economy in which the USA is represented as the engine of capitalism with its economic superiority highlighted. •