Discrimination against Roma is a reality across Europe. The extent to which stereotyped, discriminatory beliefs of this minority group are reflected or reinforced by news media has received only limited attention. This study investigates media framing of Roma and explains variation in how European news media frame Roma in diagnostic and prognostic terms. We content analysed 825 news articles from newspapers in the Netherlands, Germany, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom for the period 2010-2012. Results show that attention for Roma is clustered around key-events and differs considerably between countries. Our analyses of frame variation, based on multilevel modelling, indicate a duality in the use of frames, with Roma being both portrayed as victims and perpetrators. Variation in these portrayals could be ascribed mainly to sources and newspaper types. This study contributes to our understanding of the factors that account for problem-emphasizing portrayals of Roma in European countries.

Older employees face a severe employability problem, partly because of dominant stereotypes about them. This study investigates stereotypes of older employees in corporate and news media. Drawing on the Stereotype Content Model, we content analysed newspaper coverage and corporate media of 50 large-scale Dutch organisations, published between 2006 and 2013. The data revealed that stereotypical portrayals of older employees are more common in news media than in corporate media and mixed in terms of valence. Specifically, older employees were positively portrayed with regard to warmth stereotypes, such as trustworthiness, but negatively with regard to competence stereotypes, such as technological competence and adaptability. Additionally, stereotypical portrayals that do not clearly belong to warmth or competence dimensions are found, such as the mentoring role stereotype and the costly stereotype. Because competence stereotypes weigh more heavily in employers’ productivity perceptions, these media portrayals might contribute to the employability problem of older employees. We suggest that older employees could benefit from a more realistic media debate about their skills and capacities.

Do news media increasingly portray a distorted world image when reporting menace? The purpose of this study is to investigate how media attention for negative incidents evolves over time and how this relates to real-world trends and public responses. A longitudinal content analysis of media coverage of aviation incidents is used to provide a systematic investigation into the trends of media attention related to real-world data. Results show that while the total number of aviation incidents declined across time, relative media attention increased. Time series analysis revealed that media attention for these negative incidents was negatively associated with shifts in public responses-i.e. air travel behavior-whereas real-world statistics on aviation incidents did not seem to explain variation in public behavior. Moreover, when exploring the variation in the coverage of media attention, increasing presence of mediatization facets was observed as a potential explanation for the over-time rise in disproportional attention to negative news. In conclusion, news media may have a blind spot for progression and a distorted media reality can be a predictor of public responses instead of reality itself. KEYWORDS mediatization; negative news; news media logics; public responses; time series analysis IntroductionNews media are often accused of creating a distorted reality (e.g. Kitzinger 1999). First, in their reportage, media are frequently skewed toward the negative side if it comes to selecting news items (Hester and Gibson 2003). The journalistic tendency to focus on negative news is repeatedly considered an outcome of routine selection procedures of those stories that are believed to garner the highest ratings (e.g. Altheide 1997; Lawrence and Mueller 2003). Second, infrequent and isolated incidents have become part of the daily-news reportage, turning these rare events into the common world image (Altheide 1997;Park et al. 2009). As news develops a life of its own, one can observe discrepancies between what actually happens in the world and how the media portray it. Consequently, this research is broadly concerned with the role of the news media in processes of social construction and amplification of low-probability highconsequence negative incidents.Journalism Studies, 2019 Vol. 20, No. 6, 783-803, https This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ 4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.Scholars have argued that, as a consequence of increased commercial pressures on news media institutions, media's penchant for the negative and the exceptional has become more prominent over time (e.g. Farnsworth and Robert Lichter 2006;Semetko and Schoenbach 2003) Indeed, it has been argued that factors such as negativity have grown to become among t...

Information distributed via the news media is acknowledged as a potential source of negative beliefs about, and biased behaviors toward, older workers. Focusing on the Netherlands, the current study explains age discrimination claims filed by older workers by investigating the impact of visibility and media stereotypes of older workers in the news media, while controlling for real-world events and older workers’ expectations of unemployment (2004–2014). The results, based on time-series analysis, reveal that the visibility of older workers in the news media is associated with higher levels of age discrimination claims. This effect can be partly explained with the visibility of the negative media stereotype that older workers experience health problems in the content of news coverage. Furthermore, unemployment expectations decreased the number of age discrimination claims. These results offer support for the notion that the news environment is a source of variation in the experience of age discrimination at the workplace.