Jesper Strömbäck

Four Phases of Mediatization : An Analysis of the Mediatization of Politics

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 mediation and mediatization . However, both these concepts are used more often than they are properly defined. Moreover, there is a lack of analysis of the process of mediatization, although the concept as such denotes a process.Thus the purpose of this article is to analyze the concepts of mediated and mediatized politics from a process-oriented perspective. 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.

The Effects of Digital Media on Political Knowledge and Participation in Election Campaigns: Evidence From Panel Data

While the majority of previous research suggests there are positive relationships between digital media use and political participation and knowledge, most studies have relied on cross-sectional surveys and have thus not been able to firmly establish the chain of causality. Also, there is little research investigating use of different forms of digital media and their relative effects on political participation and knowledge. This study examines (a) the effects of digital media use on political participation and knowledge and (b) whether different forms of digital media use affect people differently. Drawing on two representative panel surveys, the study demonstrates that there are only weak effects of digital media use on political learning, but that the use of some digital media forms has appreciable effects on political participation.

In Search of a Standard: four models of democracy and their normative implications for journalism

Abstract The literature discussing the impact of media and journalism upon democracy, typically criticizes both media and journalism for their content and their negative effects on some aspects of democracy. In turn, this raises the question of identifying news standards by which the quality of news journalism might be evaluated. But neither the proposed news standards nor the criticism levelled against them specify with sufficient clarity the model of democracy to be used as a normative departure. This article argues that the question of proper news standards cannot be addressed in isolation from the question of different normative models of democracy. In order to discover news standards by which the quality of news journalism can or should be evaluated, it analyzes four normative models of democracy and their demands upon citizens: procedural democracy, competetive democracy, participatory democracy and deliberative democracy. Building upon that analysis, the article asks: What normative implications for media and news journalism follow from the distinctive perspectives of procedural, competitive, participatory and deliberative democracy?

Mission Accomplished? Framing of the Iraq War in the Elite Newspapers in Sweden and the United States

This study investigates the framing of the 2003 Iraq War in the elite newspapers in Sweden and the US, Dagens Nyheter and The New York Times. The content analysis revealed significant differences between the two papers: the military conflict frame was more common for the US war coverage while the responsibility and anti-war protest frames were more common for the Swedish war coverage. Both newspapers offered human interest stories and media self-references. The US newspaper, however, relied more heavily on official government and military sources. In addition, the tone of war coverage differed across the two nations, with Swedish reporting being more negative overall. Implications of the differences in war coverage as well as possible reasons rooted in the national media and political systems are discussed.

Political and Media Systems Matter A Comparison of Election News Coverage in Sweden and the United States

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.

The framing of politics as strategy and game: a review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings

A key concept in research on the media coverage of politics is the game or strategy frame. Contrasted with coverage of politics as issues, the framing 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 of politics 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.

Do Politicians Lead the Tango?: A Study of the Relationship between Swedish Journalists and their Political Sources in the Context of Election Campaigns

The relationship between journalists and their political sources is often described as symbiotic. Furthermore, political sources are often regarded as more powerful than journalists in this relationship. However, most of the research referred to in the international literature is done in the US or Britain. Therefore, the question regarding the relationship between journalists and their political sources, in terms of power, needs to be asked in other countries. This article examines the relationship between journalists and their political sources in Sweden during the National Election in 2002, and in so doing makes a distinction between the power over the process of news making and the media agenda, and the power over the content and the framing of news stories. The results show the importance of making such a distinction. They also show that, in Sweden, it is the journalists and not their political sources that lead the tango most of the time.

Mediatization and Media Interventionism: A Comparative Analysis of Sweden and the United States

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.

Age and the effects of news media attention and social media use on political interest and participation : Do social media function as leveller?

This article investigates how media use differs across age groups- and whether this matters for people’s inclination to participate politically. More specifically, the study investigates the impact of social media use for political purposes and of attention to political news in traditional media, on political interest and offline political participation. The findings, based on a four-wave panel study conducted during the 2010 Swedish national election campaign, show (1) clear differences in media use between age groups and (2) that both political social media use and attention to political news in traditional media increase political engagement over time. Thus, this study suggests that frequent social media use among young citizens can function as a leveller in terms of motivating political participation.

Freezing the Flow of Online News : Exploring approaches to the study of the liquidity of online news

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.