TRIVIAL STORIES AND FANCY PICTURES? Trivial Stories and Fancy Pictures? Tabloidization Tendencies in Finnish and Swedish Regional and National Newspapers 1982–1997

tendencies over time. Before we determine the ma-terial and method, we will briefly introduce some normative starting points, as well as specify our conception of tabloidization on a theoretical level. Normative Starting Points The study has a normative point of departure. Thus, we define democracy as follows: democracy in a so-ciety will be fulfilled to the extent that the citizens influentially participate in public decision-making (Ståhlberg and Helander 1972). With the term pub-lic decision-making, we do not exclusively mean decisions by elected representatives. We also em-brace other decisions that clearly influence the life of large citizen groups, e.g. labour market agree-ments. The conditions for this definition are, on the one hand, a social participation, and on the other, that this participation is influential. Both the social participation, and especially the degree of influence at the same time, depends on certain other condi-tions. The most overwhelming premise can be de-scribed as knowledge. This knowledge consists of three fields. Firstly, knowledge of which questions are, or will be, on the political agenda. Secondly, content-related knowledge of these questions and alternative views and solutions concerning the questions. Thirdly, knowledge of how different groups within the society see these questions. Equipped with this kind of knowledge, the citizen has the ability to form his/her own opinion of which solutions to support. Furthermore, the cit-izen can draw guidelines for his/her own strategic actions.1 From which sources should the citizen obtain this knowledge? Normatively, we argue that one of In recent years media researchers have noticed how commercial or market oriented news-logic is affect-ing the standard of television news, at a time of in