Medierepresentationen av världens länder
Strukturer i fyra svenska nyhetstidningar
This essay casts light on the quantitative aspect of the media representation of foreign news. The purpose of the essay is not only to describe the media representation of the countries of the world, but also to explain the representation out of structures that are mirrored by the mass media. Four hypotheses are stated that are operationalized in the research. These are treating four different factors that are believed to affect the representation, economy, geographical distance, cultural distance and the size of the population. A fifth hypothesis is stating that economy is the most influential of the factors. The factors are tested by using multiple regression analyses. Four Swedish newspapers have been selected for the study, two morning papers, one evening paper and one free daily newspaper. The representation is measured by the number of articles retrieved by searching a database containing the four newspapers. The search have included 183 countries and all articles from 2007 for these countries.The results shows that economy, geographical distance and size of population are the most important factors for the media representation. Economy is evinced to be the most influential of the factors.