Covering the Economic Crisis: Over-Time and Interoutlet Differences in Salience and Framing

• In Event: The Study of Framing in the Context of Politics

Abstract

The economic crisis that hit many Western countries in the past years has received ample media attention, but the way in which media covered the crisis is still understudied from an academic perspective. This study takes media coverage of the crisis as the dependent variable. Focusing on the Netherlands, it investigates how print media framed the crisis and to what extent temporal and outlet factors account for variation in the use of different frames. We selected three major Dutch newspapers: Het Financieele Dagblad, de Telegraaf and de Volkskrant. Relying on an in-depth qualitative content analysis and a quantitative analysis, five major frames are identified that journalists use when discussing the crisis. Our findings show that frame variation is mainly due to temporal factors. While the specific interpretation of the frames might differ across the outlets, the three newspapers show remarkable similarities in the over-time prominence of the frames they use.

Authors

• Alyt Damstra, U of Amsterdam

• Rens Vliegenthart, U of Amsterdam