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Abstract
While few would deny the crucial role of citizens in democratic governance, there are still only a few studies that focus on ordinary citizens’ inclusion in political news coverage. First, we present a number of factors conditioning ordinary citizens’ appearances in the news. Second, based on the discussion of these factors, we formulate a number of research questions. After conducting an extensive content analysis covering almost 6000 actors appearing in political news coverage in the two major Danish broadcasters, DR1 and TV2, between 1994 and 2007, we find that ordinary citizens appear more often in reports on intrusive issues such as welfare, that they appear more often in news items positioned later in the news bulletins, that they, largely speaking, appear more often closer to election day, but that there are almost no differences between commercial and public service broadcasting. These findings are discussed in the light of past research on media source use and the ongoing changing foundations of political communication.
Notes
1. The following issue categories are used: economy (taxes, unemployment, business and other economic issues), welfare (children, elderly, health and other welfare issues), law and order (law and order, immigration), cultural issues (arts, music, entertainment, royals, sports, religion, culture in general), education and science, environment and infrastructure, foreign affairs (defense, terrorism, war, foreign aid and other foreign affairs issues), campaign trail news (politicians in an election campaign, media in the campaign, opinion polls, other campaign stories), and ordinary citizens in the election campaign. Following the coding instructions, if a news story could be related to one of the substantial categories, the two campaign categories should be avoided.
2. With respect to ordinary citizens, we originally differentiated between “private citizens” representing themselves only and citizens identified as speaking on behalf of a grassroots initiative organized by a group of ordinary citizens (e.g., the on-screen text identified an actor as a representative of a grassroots initiative). However, as it turns out representatives of citizens’ grassroot activities are rarely shown, only 11 such actors were coded across all years and broadcasters. Hence, we do not differentiate between “private citizens” and representatives of grassroots initiatives in the presentation of the analyses. In addition, we excluded two categories of journalists from the empirical analyses: the host of the news bulletin and the author of a news story. Typically, both appear in all news stories. Finally, as we are interested in specific actors appearing in the news, we did not code general references to “the public” or opinion polls. These have been studied elsewhere, see Brookes et al. (2004) and Lewis et al. (2004).
