Election coverage has a tendency to frame politics as a strategic game, to increase the role of
journalists as interpreters of issues and events and to include a conflict frame, and thus indicating
increased mediatization. However, political news research outside of the election indicates that
news media are less independent from political actors. Drawing on literature on mediatization,
media interventionism, political news journalism, news framing and source use, the purpose of this
article is to empirically investigate whether election coverage is representative of other political
journalism in terms of degree of mediatization. The study is based on a systematic comparison
of three content analyses using the same coding schedule and procedure from coverage of the
Financial Crisis 2008, the Election Campaign 2010 and routine political news coverage 2012
in Sweden. The main conclusion from this study is that mediatization of media coverage is
substantially influenced by the specific context of the news.
2014. Vol. 29, no 5, p. 583-597