The Jeremiad Over Journalism

convincingly demonstrates how American officials consciously worked to gain the upper-hand in
the (cultural) Cold War. 139
However, one drawback of Kryhl Jensen‘s cultural diplomacy study from 1945 to 1960 is the fact
that the author‘s argument primarily rests on documents written between 1950 and 1952. There are
a few references to documents written by American Embassy officials in 1953 but Kryhl Jensen‘s
article does not discuss whether the conclusions reached regarding the early 1950‘s are also valid in
the late 1950‘s.
Conclusion
To sum up, Schröter and Van Elteren, for example, emphasizes the role of the American
government and the structural elements of the economy as driving forces behind American
influence. As such the theoretical framework for the content analysis of newspaper articles goes
well hand-in-hand with the main literature on Americanization with the focus on the role of
government and commercial influence.
The previous section also revealed driving forces that lets the researcher go even further in
uncovering concrete examples of Americanization. Rostgaard emphasized the importance of
studying Americanization from both a sender and receiver perspective while Kryhl Jensen,
Sørensen and Petersen place their emphasis on the cultural diplomacy being transmitted from the
American Embassy and the knowledge exchange between Denmark and the United States as well as
the importance of key actors. Sørensen in his study from 2009 furthermore focuses on the
connection between commercialization and the transfer of technology as a key driving force along
with the actions of key agents on both sides of the Atlantic.
All the above mentioned factors, the Danish and American government military and economic
policies, private companies‘ export of technology, knowledge exchange as well as key individuals
will, as evidenced by Table 2 be viewed as primary driving forces behind American influence on
Danish journalism, in the ensuing analysis of structural and symbolic Americanization. Using
theories primarily from media sociology and political science, the following section will focus on
the ideal of objectivity which played a prominent part in symbolic Americanization of Danish
journalism, and will also be used as one of two main independent variables in the subsequent
139 Ibid. Page 24-25.
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