This is an intermediate report from a study of foreign news in Swedish media as well as media in a number of other countries. We intend to discuss and test parts of a theoretical model designed to explain the selection of news. For this purpose we have used studies of news content covering the last seven decades. This material includes more than 50,000 news stories in newspapers, on radio and on television that have been manually categorized and coded. In addition, approximately 300,000 news items from different databases have been used (see Appendix).
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