Election coverage has a tendency to frame politics as a strategic game, to increase the role of journalists as interpreters of issues and events and to include a conflict frame, and thus indicating increased mediatization. However, political news research outside of the election indicates that news media are less independent from political actors. Drawing on literature on mediatization, media interventionism, political news journalism, news framing and source use, the purpose of this article is to empirically investigate whether election coverage is representative of other political journalism in terms of degree of mediatization. The study is based on a systematic comparison of three content analyses using the same coding schedule and procedure from coverage of the Financial Crisis 2008, the Election Campaign 2010 and routine political news coverage 2012 in Sweden. The main conclusion from this study is that mediatization of media coverage is substantially influenced by the specific context of the news.
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