Eesti, Saksa ja Briti kvaliteetlehtede geograafiline horisont 2004-2005

Date

2005

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Abstract

Description

This research paper is about media role in constructing people’s picture of the world. People make their choices according to the pictures in their heads. And media is one of the most important factors influencing it. Therefore it is relevant to make research on picture of the world, which media is presenting to us. Work compares the foreign news agenda in three quality-newspapers from different European countries: Postimees from Estonia, The Times from United Kingdom and Süddeutsche Zeitung from Germany. Study is based on content analysis, where all stories with foreign focus during the period of July 2004 – February 2005 (18 issues from each newspaper) were studied. The focus of present study was coverage of European Union countries. Study found out that all newspapers prefer to cover negative events from abroad. Among the topics above all the politics and economics are dominant in all three newspapers. The coverage of countries differs in three newspapers. The same tendency can be only found in extensive coverage of Europe generally and USA. Estonian newspaper concentrates on the news from Europe. British newspaper writes more about the other continents than Estonian and German dailies. The Times and Süddeutsche Zeitung cover much more conflict regions and Asian countries. South-America, Africa, Australia and Oceania are by large „grey areas“ in all newspapers (The Times directs its attention to these continents at most). Within European Union old member-states are been covered more extensively in all newspapers. Postimees writes more about new member-states than other newspapers. Postimees writes also more about small member-states, whereas British and German newspapers focus mainly on the other large member-states. Author concluded that all three newspapers transmit significantly distorted picture of the world by covering more prominent countries and neighbouring countries. Although these pictures differ in all newspapers, the main trend is similar. Author concluded that it is hard to give a normative evaluation to these results, but it is sure that the awareness of distorted world-picture given by media help to make people conscious while being exposed to the media.

Keywords

H Social Sciences (General), bakalaureusetööd

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