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Media Coverage of Greece’s September 2015 Election Campaign: Framing and Interpreting the Issues at Stake

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Mediated Campaigns and Populism in Europe

Abstract

Through agenda-setting and framing of the election campaigns, news media can exert influence on politics. We investigated the coverage of the September 2015 election campaign in nine Greek news media outlets. Our sample included three newspapers (two politically affiliated and one tabloid), three TV stations (two privately owned and the public broadcaster Elliniki Radiofonia Tileorasi-ERT), as well as three online newspapers. Through content analysis of 1.668 election news stories, we looked into news frame use among different types of media and within them. The results show that the strategy frame often prevails in newspapers, but not in television and online newspapers. Strategy frame was also correlated with the interpretative function of journalism in the press. Populism and “attack politics” also emerged as the dominant rhetoric of this election campaign, captivating media’s attention.

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Papathanassopoulos, S., Giannouli, I. (2019). Media Coverage of Greece’s September 2015 Election Campaign: Framing and Interpreting the Issues at Stake. In: Salgado, S. (eds) Mediated Campaigns and Populism in Europe. Political Campaigning and Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98563-3_2

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