Framing the Iraq War. A Cross-National Comparison of Newspaper Framing in Four Western Countries

Abstract

In this paper we compare the newspaper attention for and framing of the Iraq issue in four Western countries (US, UK, Germany and the Netherlands) during the period September 2002 until August 2003. Using computer assisted coding based on wordlists constructed by human coders, we analyzed more than 70,000 articles from 12 news- papers. We pose the question how framing differs across countries, time and newspapers. Our results confirm the vast majority of our hypotheses and demonstrate that the national political context, the political leaning of newspapers and the stage of the conflict can account for a large amount of the variation in the attention for the issue and in the way it is presented.