Television news is an excellent means of comparing political communication across countries. News programs are part of almost every television system in the world. They are usually broadcast at prime time and audiences consistently rate them as the most important of all available information programs (Straubhaar et al. 1992; Hajok and Schorb 1998). Television news provides “survival-relevant information about novel events” (Newhagen and Levy 1998, 10). It also influences political orientation, informs opinion building, and serves as a control mechanism of state power. In the pluralist societies of the western world, television news exerts a strong influence on the very nature of political communication (Kamps 1999, 141).

According to Schaap et al. (1998) the research literature on television news can be organized according to the fields of mass communication, with a focus on journalist working routines (Esser 1998), audience reception and the effects of television news at the individual level (Jensen 1998; Zillmann et al. 1998), and public opinion formation at the societal level. Thus, Iyengar and Kinder note for the United States: “television news obviously possesses the potential to shape American public opinion profoundly” (Iyengar and Kinder 1987, 1). This chapter will elaborate on a fourth approach to examining television news: the content and structure of television news (Bonfadelli 2000, 33–6). In a comparative empirical study, we have analyzed news programs from different countries according to three main categories of content and structure: news geography, issue/actor representation, and topical integration.