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In recent decades, disruptive media events, such as major terrorist attacks, have gained increasing relevance in news coverage around the world. Despite the growing importance of such globally broadcast media events, little research to date has examined cross-national variation in event coverage or the predictors of this variation. This study examines news coverage about the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States across 51 countries to analyze whether the topical focus and emotional tone of news coverage about the attacks varied according to a country's proximity to the United States and the dominant role perceptions of its journalistic culture. We show that these macro-level predictors are associated in varying degrees with the country-level topical focus and emotional tone of reporting over the 30 days following this salient event. Moreover, our analysis also suggests that temporal developments may have uniformly structured much of this worldwide coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in political perceptions and preferences may result from the combined effects of news from various media. Estimating these combined effects requires the best possible, albeit different, measures of news obtained from self-selected mass media and social media that can be linked to panel survey data concerning perceptions and preferences. For the 2017 Dutch national elections, such data is available. Political perceptions and preferences are affected by news statements in self-selected mass media on issue positions, support and criticism, real world conditions and success and failure, in accordance with the theories on agenda setting and issue ownership, social identity, retrospective voting and bandwagon effects, respectively. Combined effects emerge because many people use both mass media and social media. The latter do more than just reinforce predispositions. Social media also have a mere exposure effect, and a multistep flow effect that amplifies news about party successes and failures from self-selected mass media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]