Page 293 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

P1: KaF
0521828317c12.xml CY425/Esser 0521828317 May 26, 2004 17:4

Political Communication Messages

States. Contrary to their expectations, there was a strong correspon-
dence of the conceptualization, format, and issues in television news in
all countries, whether emanating from industrialized, socialist, or devel-
oping societies. These results are supported by Cooper Chen (1989), who
studied the main news programs in the United States, Japan, Sri Lanka,
Jamaica, and Colombia but used a rather limited sample of twenty-three
news shows for analysis.
Astudy by Heinderyckx (1993) of television news from seventeen
programs in eight West European countries analyzed four weeks of cov-
erage in the winter of 1991. He found that news in all countries exhibited
great conformity (Heinderyckx 1993, 448), due to its common emphasis
on political issues and the relative balance between national and inter-
national coverage. He attributed differences in coverage to a German
or Roman news culture, which he based on both formal criteria (pro-
gram duration, item number, and length and presentation) and content
criteria (issue selection and personalization).
Astudy by Meckel (1996) comparing news formats of national
(German ARD, BBC, French TF2) and international (Arte, CNN,
Euronews, ITN) broadcasts, encompassing formal, topical, and geo-
graphic aspects of coverage, found that news programs in all countries
are structured similarly and make use of a limited set of visual features
(Meckel 1996, 198–9).
The Foreign News Study was conducted by some of the scholars in-
volved in the initial UNESCO project (Stevenson, 2003). In response to
the renewed discussion of international news flows, the group used a
modified code scheme for the analysis of two newspapers and the main
television news program in each of the thirty-eight participating coun-
tries. However, as with the original study, this project only considered
international coverage, leaving out the domestic news. The analysis re-
vealed the profile of news values guiding the selection of foreign news in
thecountriesunderstudy(Hagenetal.1998;Wu2000;Stevenson,2003).
Thebriefoverviewofcomparativeresearchintotelevisionnewsallows
us to identify three crucial fields of interest in the study of information
coverage:

News geography:evidence of how, where, and how intensively topics
concerning a certain country are covered
Country-specific representation of issues and actors
Issue diversity or issue convergence in and across different countries

273