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This article examines the dynamic relationship between issues in environmental news reporting. The focus of the study is on issue interactions within a single news programme over a 50-year period, covering all news stories on environmental issues in the main public service news programme on Swedish television between 1961 and 2010. The analysis shows a positive correlation between levels of attention to different environmental issues; intense focus on one category of environmental issues does not crowd out other environmental concerns in the news. On the contrary, a surge in interest to one category of environmental problems generates attention to other environmental issues as well.

This article reports a study on the role of the media in democratic governance. Interestingly, this issue has not been given much attention by researchers, neither by media scholars with little interest in governance, nor by governance scholars with little knowledge about how the media works. Yet, as this study substantiates, the media is a key actor in governance. Theoretically, the paper aims at providing a cross-fertilization of perspectives on the role of the media in governance by drawing on governance research as well as on research on political communication & the public sphere. The empirical aim of the paper is to analyze how policy makers assess the importance of the media in governance. A key question addressed is the significance of fostering good media relations in order to be successful in governance in different policy areas. In addition, the paper analyzes the media strategies of policy makers' in terms of the intensity of the media contacts & of whether or not the policy makers themselves initiate the contacts. The study draws on a unique dataset, comprising questionnaire responses from the corporate, political, cultural & administrative elites (policymakers within the central government office) in Sweden. Adapted from the source document.

The lack of women's voices, status, and recognition in the news media is a challenge to both human rights and a sustainable future. Comparing Gender and Media Equality across the Globe addresses longstanding questions in the study of gender equality in media content and media organisations across countries and over time. Drawing on data from the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), and the International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF), this book offers new insights into the qualities, causes, and consequences of gender equality in and through the news media. The book contributes to the critical discussion on gender and journalism, showing that the news media do not reflect reality when it comes to the actual progress of gender equality in societies across the globe. The study aims to inspire future research by making existing data on gender and news media equality available to the global research community. The book presents the GEM-dataset, comprising hundreds of indicators on media and gender equality, and the GEM-Index, an easy to use measure to keep track of key aspects of gender equality in television, radio, newspapers, and online. "A trailblazing collection of high-quality studies from leading researchers all around the world. This splendidly edited book meets the great need for a comparative analysis of gender equality in and through news media in different regions. It is unique, full of useful empirical evidence, new insights, and reflections. This should without a doubt be required reading for anyone dealing with this issue - not least from the perspective of Agenda 2030". - Professor Ulla Carlsson, UNESCO Chair on Freedom of Expression, Media Development and Global Policy at the University of Gothenburg The book thoroughly describes the construction of the GEM-Index in the second chapter. The Index is included in the freely available GEM dataset, published alongside the book: https://www.gu.se/en/research/gemdataset

This introductory chapter by Monika Djerf-Pierre and Maria Edström provides the rationale behind the project Comparing gender and media equality across the globe and clarifies the normative theories supporting the strive for gender equality in and through the news media. The project examines equality in news media content as well as in news media organisations and conducts empirical analyses of both the causes and consequences of media and gender equality in countries across the globe. Furthermore, a unique dataset is developed within the project; The GEM dataset pools together existing comparative data on gender equality in the media, making them available for use by the global research community. The chapter also highlights previous research, discusses the key methodological considerations, explains the value of the various datasets used in the project, and provides an overview on the global commitments to improve gender equality in the media, as a context for this study. Finally, we give an overview of the whole book and a summary of the main insights from the project: Gender equality in the news media is lacking in most countries in the world. Gender equality in the news media reflects that journalism is a semi-autonomous field. The news media misrepresents reality when it comes the actual progress of gender equality in the world. The news media logic operates as a global homogeniser. Progress is both fast and slow. The gender gap in the news content is most likely greater than the gender gap in news media access and use. Monitoring instruments and reliable data are needed to know if progress occurs. Gender data on the media are still lacking. ; The project Comparing Gender and Media Equality across the Globe has been fundedby the Swedish Research Council (2016–2020) and is based at the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication (JMG) at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.The GEM dataset and its codebook are free to use and can be downloaded in variousformats. For access, contact JMG. Please ensure that proper attribution is given when citing the dataset.

In chapter 2, "The GEM Index: Constructing a unitary measure of gender equality in the news" by Monika Djerf-Pierre and Maria Edström, the authors develop a unitary measure of gender equality in news media content. Although gender and journalism has been a prolific area of research since the 1970s, we still lack a robust and easy-to-use measure to quantify, assess, and track the magnitude and persistence of gender inequalities in the news. By drawing from data collected by the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), the authors devise the Gender Equality in the news Media Index (GEM-I) – a composite index that estimate the gender gap between women and men regarding their status in the news. The GEM-I confirms a male bias in the news. Most countries in the world display news cultures that to various degrees marginalises women. Women get a regular but unequal presence in the news and more seldom appear in roles and topics that are gender-typed as masculine, such as politics and economy. ; The project Comparing Gender and Media Equality across the Globe has been fundedby the Swedish Research Council (2016–2020) and is based at the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication (JMG) at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.The GEM dataset and its codebook are free to use and can be downloaded in variousformats. For access, contact JMG. Please ensure that proper attribution is given when citing the dataset.

The article examines how local government officials in Sweden use social media and to what extent the emergence of social media has altered the relationship to conventional news media. The article examines the development of local government-media relations across time on the basis of a unique survey-based data set comparing the local political and administrative leadership's media strategies in 1989 and 2010. The 2010 survey also included questions on how local officials in Sweden use social media in their work, that is, Facebook, Twitter and blogs. The results show that local officials have appropriated social media in their work, but only to a moderate extent. Local officials engage in social media if and when the local government becomes the target of social media scrutiny. Our study also demonstrates that social media have not replaced conventional media as a means of communication with constituencies. Indeed, officials who are active social media users have more contacts with conventional media compared to less active officials. Social media thus contribute to an intensification of the mediatisation of local governance rather than replacing conventional media in local political communication.

Concepts such as risk aversion and anxiety have received renewed attention in various strands of gender and politics research. Most contemporary scholars suggest that gender gaps in this area are related to social norms and stem from social learning rather than from inherent gender traits. Very few, however, elaborate on the gender variable to reach a fuller understanding of the dynamics at work. In this study, we examined gender gaps in levels of anxiety, an area closely related to risk aversion, and we applied a combination of categorical measures of gender distinguishing between "woman, "man," and "other" and scales capturing grades of femininity and masculinity in individuals. We label this approach fuzzy gender, and we suggest that it can be used to advance research in our field. The key finding is an interaction effect between categorical measures of gender and fuzzy gender: The more female characteristics in women, the higher the levels of anxiety. Moreover, there is no difference in levels of anxiety between men and women with few female characteristics. The data used draw from a large-scale survey among Swedish citizens in 2013.

Although there is plenty of research investigating the linkages between news media use and political distrust, virtually all of these studies focus on the impact of media use on political distrust at a particular point in time. At the same time, the transition from low-choice to high-choice media environments suggests that the relationship might not be stable across time. Whatever the linkages between news media use and political distrust were in the 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s, it cannot a priori be assumed that those linkages are the same or of equal strength today. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the changing relationship between news media use and political trust across time. Among other things, the results show that there is a positive linkage between news media use and political trust but also that for some media, this relationship weakens across time.

Political accountability is fundamental in a democratic society. Societal changes such as the marketization of the public sector have, however, made accountability issues complex and negotiable. The question of who is to be held to account for policy failures is increasingly a subject of struggle within the media. The aim of this article is to examine how journalism does "accountability work" in a political setting marked by new public management. The empirical study focuses on an example of intensive news coverage of the mistreatment of elderly people in private health care, in Sweden, 2011. A corpus of 156 news items is analyzed. The analysis focuses on the use of accountability interviews, and how journalism constructs boundaries of political accountability by framing social problems. In general, the study shows that the political accountability work carried out was weak and restricted, the problems were constructed as a moral scandal instead of a policy failure.