Despite the major importance of the news media's election news
coverage, there are still only a few cross-national studies on how the
media cover elections. There are even fewer that include both
newspapers and TV news and that probe possible antecedents of how the
media frame politics in their election news. Against this background,
this article compares the media framing of election news in two
countries-Belgium and Sweden-that constitute highly similar cases and
both belong to the democratic corporatist model of media and politics.
The study focuses on the importance of media channels, media types, and
commercialism as antecedents of the media's framing of election news.