Page 292 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Patrick R¨ ossler

TELEVISION NEWS CONTENT AND STRUCTURES:
EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM SELECTED STUDIES

Comparing media content in different languages is a demanding task
that raises fundamental methodological questions. This is particularly
the case when languages other than English (as a lingua franca)or the
researcher’sownareinvolved.Distributingfieldworktoin-countryteams
may reduce difficulties concerning the collection of raw material and
coder training, but it causes huge problems with coding reliability (Lauf
and Peter 2001). This may be the reason why international comparisons
of news coverage are rare, and why those that do exist tend to focus
on print news material, such as newspapers and magazines, rather than
onbroadcastnews(Stevenson1985).Comparativeresearchontelevision
news across countries and cultures is currently limited to a handful of
empirical studies.
The Foreign Images Project is a landmark study in the field that was
conductedbyagroupofresearchersorganizedbytheInternationalAsso-
ciationforMediaandCommunicationResearch(Sreberny-Mohammadi
et al. 1985) and supported by the United Nations Educational, Scientific,
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This study explored the extent
to which different regions and continents appeared within the foreign
news reporting of countries (see the News Geography section). Using
both qualitative and quantitative methods, it assessed news in print and
audiovisual media from twenty-nine countries for a fictitious and an ac-
tual week in 1979. National teams of coders in thirteen countries shared
acoding manual; native speakers living in the United States completed
the coding for sixteen further countries (Sreberny-Mohammadi et al.
1985, 14–15).
Unlike the Foreign Images Project, the studies by Cohen et al. (1990),
Straubhaar et al. (1992), and Cooper Chen (1989) included all coverage
and not just foreign news in their samples. Cohen, Adoni, and Bantz
(1990) were interested in the amount of conflict represented in the news
in five industrialized nations. Their analysis of news programs in 1980
and 1984 revealed that there was more conflict in British and Israeli tele-
vision news than in German, South African, and U.S. news. Their study
also showed that foreign news was generally more conflict oriented than
domestic news (Cohen et al. 1990, 156). Straubhaar et al. (1992) used
translated transcripts to compare the structure of news in China, Ger-
many, India, Italy, Japan, Colombia, the Soviet Union, and the United

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