A Cross-Cultural Content Analysis of the 2008 American Presidential Election

Agenda-setting theory, based on the idea that journalism has a strong correlation to audience opinion and evaluation of issue salience, shows the unportance of how the media present the news. Naturally, media values vary across cultures, wherein some news outlets serve only to inform and others approach news through partisan positions or evaluative tactics. Especially during a time of media upset in the United States, it is important to examine U.S. media values and those of other cultures. This thesis looks at some of the dominant and documented differences in newspaper reporting in France and the United States, using Patterson’s governing and game schema as a basis. In accordance with previous research, French journalism was found to be more evaluative and American journalism to employ a game schema more often, although the results are mainly inconclusive due to the small sample size and large margins of error