The Jeremiad Over Journalism

5.2.3 Selection Criteria
―Perhaps there has never been a President-designate who so clearly enjoyed or so thoroughly
depended on the sound of his own voice (…)‖ 518
The units of analysis are newspaper stories concerning national elections. Manual selection has
been employed to select only front page stories, since these display ―the most prominent stories
about elections.‖ 519 Content analyses based on database searches are extremely efficient in terms of
the time and money they save the researcher, but results based solely on these searches also raise
some red flags because of the occasional discrepancy between print and electronic versions of
publications. ―Reliance on NEXIS and Dow Jones alone will likely miss articles found in the
hardcopy or microfilm version of the newspaper,‖ conclude political scientists James Snider and
Kenneth Janda in their study of how closely databases reflect actual print versions of newspapers. 520
Additionally, manual selection is the only option available to researchers working with Danish
newspaper content before 1991 as the only electronic newspaper archive, Infomedia, only goes back
to 1990 for the major Danish publications, and even articles about the Danish national election in
1990 are not part of the material contained in the database. 521
As a result, the articles used in the present study have been cross-checked between the microfilm
version and electronic versions when these were available. However, following Strömbäck and
Dimitrova‘s example, only front page articles referring explicitly to the national election or
referring to candidates or the parties competing in the election have been selected. Moreover, the
election itself had to be mentioned prominently in the first four paragraphs of the articles, an
approach also inspired by Strömbäck and Dimitrova‘s study of Swedish and American news content
518
Howell Raines, "He Has a Way with Words: Ronald Wilson Reagan," The New York Times, November 6, 1980.
519
Strömbäck and Dimitrova, "Political and Media Systems Matter: A Comparison of Election News Coverage in
Sweden and the United States." Page 138.
520
J.H. Snider and Kenneth Janda, "Newspapers in Bytes and Bits: Limitations of Electronic Databases for Content
Analysis," in Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 3-6 (The
Marriott Hotel, Boston,1998). Snider and Janda, however, point out that newspapers producing most of their own
content (I.e. New York Times and Los Angeles Times) have fewer omissions of material than other newspapers. Yet
these big papers also have many different regional versions of their paper which leads to other challenges for
researchers.
521
Articles which appear on the frontpage of Politiken in 1990 such as ―S står til sejr ved julevalg,‖ from November 22,
1990 is not part of the database despite Infomedia claiming to have Politiken-content stretching back to January 1,
1990.
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