Political Balance

The current chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part, we follow the preceding chapters and provide an overview of political balance in news coverage in 14 European democracies and the United States and focus more closely on the differences across media types. These analyses show that balance in terms of visibility and tone is a structural feature of political news coverage across countries and outlets. In the second part, we try to explain why some parties get more attention than others across countries and why some parties receive more favorable coverage and others less. We will contrast the regulative approach with the journalistic approach. In this way, this chapter contributes to the scholarly debate on which factors drive the general production of news coverage. Note that unlike the previous chapters in this book, we did not include the Netherlands in this chapter's analyses - hence the l5 countries. The data gathered on the Netherlands covered postelection coalition negotiations and a replacement of government, rendering it difficult to define some of the independent variables used in the analyses. The chapter will end with a discussion highlighting the implications of our findings and sketching directions for future research