Euroopa uudisajakirjade geograafiline fookus: ajakirjade Der Spiegel’i ja The Observer’i 2010.aasta välisuudiste rubriigi näitel
Date
2011
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
The geographical focus of European news magazines: The foreign news section of Der Spiegel
And The Observer in 2010.
This research paper is focused on media role in constructing Europeans’ picture of the world. Media
is one of the most effective factors of influencing people’s attitude to one or another world region.
Therefore it is relevant to conduct the research on picture of the world, that media is presenting.
Work compares the foreign news agenda in two weekly quality-newspapers from Great Britain (The
Observer) and Germany (Der Spiegel). Research is based on content analysis; 140 stories from
world news section during the period January-November 2010 were studied.
The result of the research considers the preference of the quality-newspapers to cover mostly neutral
or negative events from abroad. The most popular topics are the politics for Der Spiegel and social
life for The Observer. Those differences seem to occur due to inequality of media culture.
The coverage of countries also differs in the newspapers. The same tendency mainly considers the
extensive coverage of European region and USA. Der Spiegel and The Observer cover much
conflict regions and Asian countries as well. South-America, Africa, Australia and Oceania do not
provide much interest for those newspapers.
Speaking about the ways of expression is possible to say that in Der Spiegel more creative language
as well as different metaphors, euphemisms and others are used. At the same time for The Observer
exactly the production of the fact information is more important, which means the creativity is not
the main goal. In addition for both newspapers as well as for both countries definition of “our” and
“your” countries differs very much and that provide differences in representation of the regions.
As a result of the research it is possible to report, that these two quality-newspapers transmit
significantly distorted picture of the world by covering more prominent and politically active
countries. Neighboring countries and European region are also more popular than any other part of
the world.