Independence and autonomy from political power are core values among professional journalists in most western societies. At the same time, research has shown that news media organizations rely heavily on official actors for the construction of news. The purpose of this study is to analyse the nature of official dominance and manifestations of news media independence strategies in routine political press coverage in Sweden. Building upon past research on official dominance, objectivity rituals, indexing and the rule of product substitution — a set of hypotheses is derived and tested using a content analysis of 835 news stories published in Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet during a 15-week period in 2008. While official actors dominate news coverage both in terms of source use and story initiation, evidence for a rule of product substitution is found.
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