The two most mentioned Eastern European countries in that year were Russia and Ukraine. The year when the relative difference in the number of mentions is smallest is 2014. While there does not appear to be a trend in relative coverage, there is considerable variation from year to year. Over the entire time period, the 21 Western European countries were mentioned on average 2.7 times more than the 22 Eastern European countries. We see a clear difference in the amount of coverage devoted to Eastern and Western European countries. While this simple measure of news coverage can be informative, it does not take into account many other aspects of a country’s prominence in the news, such as the length of articles, where articles appear, the tone of coverage, etc.įigure 1 plots the sum of annual number of mentions by region over time. As a percentage of all articles published by the four newspapers in 2021, roughly 20% mention at least one of these countries. Since two or more countries can be named in the same article, the total number of mentions does not correspond to the number of articles. A country mention is an article in which the name of a country appears. We choose the four most widely read Swedish newspapers ( Aftonbladet, Expressen, Dagens Nyheter, and Svenska Dagbladet) and use the newspaper database Retriever Research Media Archive to obtain statistics on the number of mentions of each country between 19. Trade relations and cultural proximity are associated with higher media coverage. Sweden is more culturally similar to the average Western European country in terms of language, religion and attitudes, cultural values and social norms. We find that while Eastern European countries are on average not more geographically distant from Sweden, Sweden tends to have closer trade links with Western European countries. We investigate several factors that could explain this pattern. We find consistently more coverage devoted to Western compared to Eastern Europe in the Swedish press. In this brief, we collect data on the mentions of Eastern and Western European countries in the main Swedish newspapers over the past decades. Eisensee and Strömberg (2007) find that news coverage affects how much disaster relief the US sends to foreign countries. For example, Snyder and Strömberg (2010) show that local press coverage affects how informed US voters are about their representatives and in turn how much their politicians work in the interest of their constituencies. There is ample empirical evidence on the agenda-setting power of the news media. Whether and how events are covered by the news determines their relevance in the public debate. The media plays a vital role in modern societies by keeping the public informed and policymakers accountable.
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