In 2009, the outbreak of a new flu virus in Mexico developed into the first pandemic in more than 40 years. For years the world had been warned about such a catastrophic global epidemic, but influenza A/H1N1 (also called swine flu or Mexican flu) turned out to be even milder than the common flu. This study is based on a content analysis of newspaper and television coverage from April to December 2009, and focuses on the volume and the content of the news coverage of the pandemic in the Netherlands. The research shows that media coverage was intensive and alarming, especially during the first and third stages of the epidemic. As it turns out, news sources had about the same share of alarming messages as the media. Therefore, although the media were indeed alarming in their coverage, they were so on the authority of their sources, the experts and the public health officials.

On newspaper websites, journalists can observe the preferences of the audience in unprecedented detail and for low costs, based on the audience clicks (i.e. page views) for specific news articles. This article addresses whether journalists use this information to cater to audience preferences in their news selection choices. We analyzed the print and online editions of five national newspapers from the Netherlands with a mixed-method approach. Using a cross-lagged analysis covering 6 months, we found that storylines of the most-viewed articles were more likely to receive attention in subsequent reporting, which indicates that audience clicks affect news selection. However, based on interviews with editors we found that they consider the use of

The 9/11 terrorist attacks and later attacks such as those in London and Madrid shocked the world and found their way into the newspapers of many countries. The authors study the international coverage of these events in the context of globalization versus localization and the creation of the dominant post-cold war frame of the War on Terror. Using automatic co-occurrence analysis based on the notion of associative framing, they investigate whether these events were mainly framed in a local or global way in the American, British, and Dutch press. The authors found that although proximity is still a strong determinant of attention for events, the framing of these events was more affected by the global event of 9/11 than by local considerations.

Analysis of political communication is an important aspect of political research. Thematic content analysis has yielded considerable success both with manual and automatic coding, but Semantic Network Analysis has proven more difficult, both for humans and for the computer. This article presents a system for an automated Semantic Network Analysis of Dutch texts. The system automatically extracts relations between political actors based on the output of syntactic analysis of Dutch newspaper articles. Specifically, the system uses pattern matching to find source constructions and determine the semantic agent and patient of relations, and name matching and anaphora resolution to identify political actors. The performance of the system is judged by comparing the extracted relations to manual codings of the same material. Results on the level of measurement indicate acceptable performance. We also estimate performance at the levels of analysis by using a case study of media authority, resulting in good correlations between the theoretical variables derived from the automatic and manual analysis. Finally, we test a number of substantive hypotheses with regression models using the automatic and manual output, resulting in highly similar models in each case. This suggests that our method has sufficient performance to be used to answer relevant political questions in a valid way.

The rapid developments in neuroscientific techniques raise high expectations among the general public and therefore warrant close monitoring of the translation to the media and daily-life applications. The need of empirical research into neuroscience communication is emphasized by its susceptibility to evoke misconceptions and polarized beliefs. As the mass media are the main sources of information about (neuro-)science for a majority of the general public, the objective of the current research is to quantify how critically and accurately newspapers report on neuroscience as a function of the timing of publication (within or outside of periods of heightened media attention to neuroscience, termed “news waves”), the topic of the research (e.g. development, health, law) and the newspaper type (quality, popular, free newspapers). The results show that articles published during neuroscience news waves were less neutral and more optimistic, but not different in accuracy. Furthermore, the overall tone and accuracy of articles depended on the topic; for example, articles on development often had an optimistic tone whereas articles on law were often skeptical or balanced, and articles on health care had highest accuracy. Average accuracy was rather low, but articles in quality newspapers were relatively more accurate than in popular and free newspapers. Our results provide specific recommendations for researchers and science communicators, to improve the translation of neuroscience findings through the media: 1) Caution is warranted during periods of heightened attention (news waves), as reporting tends to be more optimistic; 2) Caution is also warranted not to follow topic-related biases in optimism (e.g., development) or skepticism (e.g., law); 3) Researchers should keep in mind that overall accuracy of reporting is low, and especially articles in popular and free newspapers provide a minimal amount of details. This indicates that researchers themselves may need to be more active in preventing misconceptions to arise.