Science news in a closed and an open media market: A comparative content analysis of print and online science news in Denmark and the United Kingdom

Abstract

Most content analyses of science news are conducted in large Anglo-American media markets. However, we speculate that the intimacy between sources and journalists in small media markets can influence science coverage. Here, we present a comparative analysis of Danish and British newspaper science news in 2012. We find that in both countries science news amounts to about 4% of the total news flow. We also observe that Danish science news more often than British science news is triggered by political events, gives priority to national stories and includes more coverage of humanities and social sciences. Contrary, British science news is more traditional and favours stories on health and the natural sciences often triggered by a journal article. We attribute these differences to intimacy between the public, media, political and scientific spheres in Denmark partly rooted in a closed corporatist media market compared to an open liberal market in the United Kingdom.

Institutional promotion of research in Humanities and Social Sciences in Spain: SINC news agency of the Spanish Science and Technology Foundation-FECYT

“…Furthermore, research in this regard is very scarce. The only two research works that have been conducted on the presence of Humanities and Social Sciences in the media, based on the pioneering meta-analysis (Schäfer, 2012), present very diverging data that vary from figures indicating a presence of less than 30% to more than 60% of humanistic disciplines, depending on the criterion adopted (Šuljok and Vuković, 2013;Summ and Volpers, 2016;Vestergård and Nielsen, 2016). In a macro-study conducted more than a decade ago on a group of 13 countries (Bentley and Kyvik, 2011), excluding Spain, all knowledge areas were considered.…”

Institutional promotion of research in Humanities and Social Sciences in Spain: SINC news agency of the Spanish Science and Technology Foundcation-FECYT

“…Furthermore, research in this regard is very scarce. The only two research works that have been conducted on the presence of Humanities and Social Sciences in the media, based on the pioneering meta-analysis (Schäfer, 2012), present very disparate data that vary from figures indicating a presence of less than 30% to more than 60% of humanistic disciplines, depending on the criterion adopted (Šuljok and Vuković, 2013;Summ and Volpers, 2016;Vestergård and Nielsen, 2016). In a macro-study conducted more than a decade ago on a group of 13 countries (Bentley and Kyvik, 2011), excluding Spain, all knowledge areas were considered.…”

Institutional promotion of research in Humanities and Social Sciences in Spain: SINC news agency of the Spanish Science and Technology Foundation-FECYT

“…Furthermore, research in this regard is very scarce. The only two research works that have been conducted on the presence of Humanities and Social Sciences in the media, based on the pioneering meta-analysis (Schäfer, 2012), present very disparate data that vary from figures indicating a presence of less than 30% to more than 60% of humanistic disciplines, depending on the criterion adopted (Šuljok and Vuković, 2013;Summ and Volpers, 2016;Vestergård and Nielsen, 2016). In a macro-study conducted more than a decade ago on a group of 13 countries (Bentley and Kyvik, 2011), excluding Spain, all knowledge areas were considered.…”