Danish News Media Research Articles

Mobilizing and countering ‘the bad story’: the role of media narratives about traumatized veterans in Danish militarization processes

ABSTRACT This article investigates how Danish news media and popular culture represent war veterans and how the dominant form of representation can be linked to a general process of militarization in a Danish context. Focusing on the narratives and representations of Danish veterans allow for a study of how the veteran emerges as culturally significant figure in a Nordic welfare state without a well-established tradition for international military engagement. By reading across a set of newspaper articles and two popular TV series, Ride upon the storm and Warrior, a dominant pathologizing discourse focusing on the veteran-victim is identified and discussed.

Media Issue Crystallization: The Case of Microplastic in Denmark

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to explore news media constructions of the emergence of a wicked problem. The study takes as its point of departure, the environmental issue of microplastic, which has recently received increased interest from academia as well as popular media due to its controversial nature. Utilizing dialectical theory as a framework, Danish news media provide the basis for a qualitative inductive analysis that explores the issue crystallization process of microplastics. As a result, a general model of this process is developed, which can be used to understand the dynamic interrelated conditions of media constructions of a wicked environmental issue. More specifically, the model highlights the key dialectical themes that drive the issue demarcation process.

Vaccine Assemblages on Three HPV Vaccine-Critical Facebook Pages in Denmark from 2012 to 2019

Misinformation about vaccines on social media is a growing concern among healthcare professionals, medical experts, and researchers. Although such concerns often relate to the total sum of information flows generated online by many groups of stakeholders, vaccination controversies tend to vary across time, place, and the vaccine at issue. We studied content generated by administrators on three Facebook pages in Denmark established to promote critical debate about Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination. We developed a qualitative coding frame allowing us to analyze administrators’ posts in terms of prevalent topics and intertextual material incorporated by linking and sharing. We coded more than a third of the posts (n = 699) occurring in the period from November 2012, when the first page was founded, to May 2019. We found that the pages mainly addressed the reports of adverse events following HPV vaccination and the (perceived) inadequate response of healthcare systems. To construct their central message, the pages assembled different sources, mostly reporting from Danish news media, but also personal narratives, scientific information, political assertions, and more. We conclude that HPV vaccination assemblages such as these pages are heterogeneous and contextual. They are not uniform sites of vaccine criticism, but rather seem to respond to and exchange information and misinformation within the communication environment in which they are embedded.

Interest group representation and framing in the media: A policy area perspective

This article analyzes interest group representation and framing in the news media. In contrast to previous work, it focuses on the role of the policy area in shaping the types of groups appearing in the media and the frames used by groups. Empirically, the analysis maps group representation and framing across six different policy areas in the Danish news media. It distinguishes between whether groups frame their viewpoints as furthering (a) the interests of group members, (b) the interests of other specific societal groups, (c) broad economic concerns, or (d) public interests in general. Interest group representation and framing is found to vary between these policy areas. Some areas mainly contrast economic groups and the interests of their members, whereas debates in other areas are more likely to be shaped by references to beneficiaries of welfare state services or broad, public interests.

Spiritual Nontroversies: Framing Conflicts and Controversies of Religion and Spirituality in Danish News Media

This article analyzes two Danish news stories in order to discuss the reasons that spirituality seems to be less newsworthy than religion. Drawing on Anderson’s concept of imagined communities, and Luhmann’s account of the mass media in a modern functionally differentiated society, I argue that spirituality seldom registers as controversial in the news stories. It lacks the scale necessary to be selected as newsworthy. Additionally, it is not a natural source of systemic irritation for many subsystems, probably only for the systems of religion and science. The two cases involves media controversies on news production on mindfulness in the health system and on the use of animal telepathy in the majority church.

Commentators on daily news or communicators of scholarly achievements? The role of researchers in Danish news media

The objective of this article is to analyze the role played by researchers in news media. The method is a quantitative content analysis of 640 newspaper articles combined with two surveys: of journalists ( N = 362) and researchers ( N = 342) respectively. The conclusions are that researchers from the soft disciplines mainly contribute to hard news or background items, where their role is to comment on daily events as public experts. They do this because they consider it career enhancing. The journalists who use them as sources are often inexperienced journalists. However, they set the agenda. Both parties perceive the cooperation positively although researchers tend to be more reserved than the journalists.

Mediernes formidling af meningsmålinger: Indholdsanalyse af folketingsvalg, 2005-2011

This article examines the information the Danish news media provide when reporting public opinion polls. e study has been done through quantitative content analysis of 424 newspaper and Internet articles from four major Danish dailies during the last three parliamentary elections. e study found that only about half of the seven ESOMAR/WAPOR-requirements included here were reported. e results from the estimated regression show that the media in general provides more methodological information in newspaper articles than on the Internet, and that the media becomes better at reporting public opinion polls over time. Com- pared with studies conducted in other countries we nd no systematic deviation in how public opinion polls are reported in Denmark.

Interest groups in the media: Bias and diversity over time

AbstractA prominent presence in the news media is important for interest groups. This article investigates the development in the diversity of interest group media attention over time. The analysis draws on a dataset of 19,000 group appearances in the Danish news media in the period 1984–2003. It demonstrates how diversity has risen continually over time, leading to a media agenda less dominated by labour and business and more by public interest groups and sectional groups. This development is related to the increasing political importance of the news media and the decline in group integration in public decision‐making processes. The article also shows how the development of group appearances is closely related to changes in media attention towards different policy areas.

Intersektionalitet i voldtægtsnarrativer

The article shows how the Danish news media’s portrayals of meetings between visible minority males and ethnically Danish females have participated in constructing certain images of gender, sexuality and race/ ethnicity. It illustrates how understandings of these categories are interwoven with understandings of nationality and Danishness. The article shows how ethnically Danish females have been constructed as symbolic reproducers of the nation, and how sexual assaults against ethnically Danish women therefore have been interpreted as assaults against the nation. The article explains how this understanding has been at play in rape narratives where gender has been articulated in rape cases with white ethnically Danish perpetrators whereas race/ethnicity has been articulated as an explanation for rape in cases with visible minority perpetrators.

Importing Journalistic Ideals and Practices? The Case of Public Journalism in Denmark

This exploratory case study discusses how and why the Danish experiments with public journalism have differed from their U.S. counterparts in several important respects. It shows that, in contrast to U.S. news organizations committed to public journalism, Danish news organizations have (1) advocated specific solutions to problems, (2) made special efforts to highlight the concerns of traditionally marginalized publics, and (3) encouraged citizens to develop substantive, systemic solutions while using experts as citizen advisors. The study concludes that while the character of the Danish public journalism initiatives could be attributed to the professional self-understanding of Danish journalists, it also could be understood as one of many manifestations of the increasing populism of Danish news media more generally.

Livet er for kort til kvindefodbold - om kvindefodbold, homfobi og (re)præsentationer af homofobi i den dansk avispresse

Et bidrag til en mangelfuld litteratur om kvinder og fodbold, fordomme og maskulinitet.Life is too short for women’s football – on women’s football, homophobia and (re)presentations of homophobia in the Danish pressInternational success has not been the hallmark of Danish women’s soccer since the early 1970s, when the national team won the unofficial World Cup in Mexico and caught the interest of Danish news media and the Danish public in general. Since then only scarce media attention has been paid to Danish women’s soccer. With a specific aim of exploring the current interest of Danish media in women’s soccer – its character and images – this article examines the (re)presentations of women’s soccer in selected Danish newspapers in the period from 1995 through 2001. The theoretical point of departure is taken in the concept of homophobia, and includes a discussion of how homophobian attitudes may shape women’s engagement in sports. Against this backdrop, five homophobian themes emerge from the analysis of Danish newspaper (re)presentations on women’s soccer, each of them pointing to a sport in which women are now being accepted but yet not respected.

Mammography: attitudes and reactions.

Since the Danish news media has demonstrated a long-term interest in breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, it can be assumed that the general public is well informed about both the advantages and risk factors of mammography. Our study of women’s current attitudes toward mammography is an effort to predict the future acceptability of mammographic screening.

Europæisk offentlighed i danske medier – Danmark som foregangsland for udviklingen af en transnational politisk journalistik?

This article focuses on the Europeanization of the Danish news media. Europeanization of media content refers to two central criteria: a) an increased focus on European themes and actors, and b) an evaluation of theses themes and actors from a connation state dominated point of view. According to such criteria,recent studies across Europe, have documented a significant level of overall Europeanization of Danish media at the level of media content. This article compares the results of some of the most recent studies of Europeanization and tries to answer the question of what makes Denmark a best-case example, when it comes to Europeanization of the news media.