Abstract
Johan Galtung & Mari Holmboe Ruge (1965) hypothesize that the more consonant an event is with the mental image of what journalists expect to find, the more probable journalists will consider that event to be newsworthy. This article on foreign news in the Netherlands underpins this hypothesis, as well as the related hypotheses of unambiguity and negativity .
It is assumed that mental pre-images of journalists are reflected in the news they present. To reconstruct the mental images reflected in the news, the NET-method for content analysis ('Networkanalysis of Evaluative Texts', Van Cuilenburg et al. (1986, 1988)) was used.
Because images are sometimes real in their consequences, political implications of consonantly structured foreign news in the Netherlands, France and the United States are briefly discussed.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.