Tolkandets tid

This study examines the development of political news analysis during three routine periods, 2004, 2008 and 2012, using framing and mediatization as a theoretical framework. In order to examine this development, we have analyzed political news journalism in Aftonbladet, Expressen, Dagens nyheter and Svenska dagbladet – the four largest, nationwide papers. We aim to utilize previous research whenever possible and these four papers stood out from a cumulative research perspective. We chose this theme for the study partly because of the lack of research on political news journalism during between election periods. We saw this as an opportunity to provide new insight to the field of mediatization research. We wanted to see if there would be any correlation between our results and those of the election focused studies.
Our results show that while political news analysis has decreased slightly from 9 percent of political news journalism in 2004 to 8 percent 2012, overall, interpretative news journalism has increased. From 26 percent 2004 to 41 percent 2012. We can also see that framing politics as a game, rather than reporting the actual political issues, has increased from 41 percent to 48 percent 2012. In addition to this we looked at the number of direct sources in political news journalism. In our research we have found that there are no directly cited political sources in 69 percent of the political news journalism.
We cannot see a substantial change in the amount of political news analysis during our research period. But we have seen a growing tendency to frame politics as game, which can be attributed to the increasing mediatization of the political sphere. This has happened in concordance with the increase of interpretive approach to political news journalism. The amount of directly cited political sources is least prevalent in articles that frame politics as a game. This type of journalism is also vastly increasing in number, largely a result of mediatization.
All this leads us to believe that there has been a migration of interpretation from analysis to traditionally descriptive news articles