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This article presents a comparative content analysis of the US and French national press in the 1960s and 1990s to test hypotheses about the influence of media structure on journalistic discourse. The US and French press are presented as strongly contrasting models, with the US press more commercialized, and the French press more closely tied to the political field. Using a variety of story- and paragraph-level content indicators, this studyshows that the French press ( Le Monde and Le Figaro) offers relatively more critical coverage, a greater representation of civil society viewpoints, a stronger emphasis on both the ideological and strategic ‘game’ aspects of politics, and a higher proportion of interpretation and opinion mixed with factual reporting. Representing the US national press, The New York Times is shown to ‘index’ its coverage more closely to political elite viewpoints. Despite globalizing pressures, French-US differences have not diminished over time.

Despite growing academic interest in political and cultural globalization, sociologists have failed to systematically account for the factors that favor cross-national convergence or divergence in the form or content of public political debates in news media. This article uses two original data sets on American and French news reporting on immigration and sexual harassment to test the effects of four factors potentially relevant to such convergence or divergence: 1) cultural repertoires, 2) legal constraints, 3) journalistic field relations to the state and market and competition among journalistic outlets, and 4) global position of nation-states. Differences in dominant national cultural repertoires correlate with persistent cross-national variations in media frames. Legal reform related to the two issues offers a strong explanation of shifts in framing over time. Lesser news media autonomy vis-à-vis the state is associated with fewer journalistic enterprise stories on immigration and less reporting on sexual harassment scandals, while greater competition may make sensationalized reporting on immigration more likely. America's dominant position in the global political economy correlates with substantially greater visibility of U.S. policies and personalities in France, than vice versa. There is some evidence for greater cross-national divergence in issue frames over time, as U.S. global visibility and influence have increased.

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This study examines how media system differences in the form of news change or stay the same as newspapers in the United States (liberal), Denmark (democratic corporatist), and France (polarized pluralist) move from print to online. Internet technological affordances are posited to move online news toward more advertising and information (liberal model) and more opinion and deliberation (polarized pluralist model). In the liberal direction, advertising and more localized, light news increase; toward polarized pluralism, news as a whole declines while deliberation, opinion, and nonjournalistic voices increase slightly. A lesser degree of change in France may be due to greater state insulation from market pressures; some contradictory tendencies in Denmark indicate that technological influences are shaped by contextual national factors.