The Jeremiad Over Journalism

Based on the results described below, the ―inference‖ section in Krippendorff‘s framework, it will
be argued that the commercial influence seen in the United States since the 1970‘s has been
hampered within the Danish newspaper market in part because of direct government subsidies to
media outlets and partly because of the greater professionalization of Danish journalists in terms of
education and autonomy from political parties. 540 Journalistic professionalism and the government
subsidized support for Danish newspapers, combined with the contextual issues surrounding the
different national elections, have ostensibly influenced coverage in the two different countries. As
will become apparent, the closeness of the 2000 election in the United States seemingly leads to
increased strategy coverage, while the issue of immigration played a pivotal role in the 2001
election in Denmark. These contextual factors appear to be reflected in the content analysis‘ results.
The following section will describe the content analysis‘ result and present the results in graphs
interspersed with concrete examples from the newspaper coverage when relevant and relate these
back to hypotheses.
5.3.1 Form over substance
Tables 8 and 9 show a tendency of declining issue coverage in the United States for The New York
Times (p