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Four journalistic schemata are prominent in the media logic debate: journalists' preference for personalised coverage, contest coverage, negative coverage, and limited issue diversity. This study tests whether these journalistic schemata are four indicators of a single media logic and whether this logic is shared by media outlets. The manifestation of these four journalistic schemata in television and newspaper coverage of five Dutch national election campaigns (1998 - 2010) was measured by a Semantic Network Analysis. Personalised coverage, contest coverage, negative coverage, and limited issue diversity indeed form four indicators of a single media logic. This logic is shared among newspapers and television broadcasters. What is more, the study surprisingly shows that the degree of personalised coverage and contest coverage has decreased, the tone of the news has become less negative, and the issue diversity has increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently Lance Bennett and Shanto Iyengar (2008) argued that the rise of a new media landscape with overwhelmingly partisan selective exposure to news media would preclude news effects to occur. The research question of the current paper is whether a new era of minimal-effects is dawning indeed as a result of selective exposure. The data come from a ten wave panel survey study that included questions about media consumption and political preferences, and a daily content analysis of the news during the 2010 election campaign in the Netherlands. Voters were divided into four categories, depending on whether voters opted for media that agreed with them on their political preferences at the start of the campaign. Voters who attended to media who agreed them were considered to be consumers of partisan media. Voters could also attend hostile media, a combination of hostile and partisan media, or only indifferent media. The research results show that news effects show up, irrespective of whether one uses partisan media, hostile media, indifferent media, or a mix of hostile and partisan media. Users of partisan media are influenced especially by issue news, whereas voters of hostile media or indifferent media are influenced more often by horse race news about successes and failures of parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assesses to what extent the Dutch electorate was given a pluralistic offer of viewpoints in the media coverage during the election campaign of 2006. Moreover, we looked at the extent to which voting behavior of newspaper readers was a reflection of this offer. The level of pluralism of five traditional newspapers with a partisan history, stemming from pillarization, and two free dailies was measured. Hereby we looked at three forms of bias: Coverage bias, referring to the amount of attention media pay to political actors; agenda bias, focusing on the issues covered in the different newspapers; and statement bias, dealing with media opinions about the political actors in the campaign arena. We combined these date with opinion data collected from a bi-weekly seven wave panel survey. Our study detected two interesting features of the relationship between media and politics. First, the traditional newspapers are, to a certain degree, still characterized by a bias towards the parties they used to be aligned with. Second, news coverage knows a 'power bias'; incumbent parties receive more attention than opposition parties, although the tone towards incumbent parties is more negative. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large data sets of coded textual content are required to answer many research questions in Communication Science. These data sets are often comprised of textual content from different time periods or genres, and are often coded by different teams at different moments. In order to combine different datasets for a larger scale analysis, codebook merging is necessary. One important issue is normally ignored, that is, concept drift over time. This paper proposes a technique to utilise extensional mapping to alleviate the problems of codebook merging and topic drift. We compare the intensional and extensional mappings as well as investigate the mapping chains over time. This initial research shows the potential of the associative character of extensional mapping-chains and open a promising direction for communication science research. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study a comparative methods for assessing frames in the audio and visual modality of television news is presented. This method is tested on data from three Dutch news programs covering the 2006 Dutch National Election campaign. Interestingly, the redundancy differs per content characteristic and network. Redundancy for issues is really poor, redundancy for actors is better. Redundancy also differs per frame; frames about issues are weaker in redundancy than frames about actors. And redundancy strongly differs per network. A better understanding of the interplay between audio and visual modalities is important, because audio-visual redundancy in television news enhances comprehensibility and recall of news. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades election campaigns in Western European countries have become increasingly dynamic which is reflected in high levels of volatility, indecisiveness, and abstention. This paper assesses the effect of the amount and the tone of strategy news on these three pathologies of electoral behavior, while distinguishing between news about criticism and support and news about success and failure. The analyses were based on Semantic Network Analysis of newspaper and television news coverage and panel studies conducted during three Dutch national election campaigns. The two types of strategy news have opposing effects on electoral behavior. While strategy news about criticism and support causes an increase in intra electoral volatility and a decrease in indecisiveness and abstention, strategy news about success and failure sorts opposite effects. These results indicate that a distinction should be made between different forms of strategy news when analyzing its effects on electoral behavior. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conflict between Israel and the Palestines can be considered a regional conflict with a global impact. World leaders such as Tony Blair, and George Bush attempt to mediate between the parties. With the opinion of the international community as a poten ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]