Who's Responsible for the cucumber crisis? A comparative Study of News Coverage

This study examines news media coverage of a crisis across different countries to test for any possible differences in terms of journalists’ choice of crisis issues, tones and frames and to investigate to which extent the way a crisis is covered by the press is affected by diverse media systems and journalistic practices. The crisis that was chosen is a health related emergency that lasted over two months during May and June 2011. 370 news articles from two leading newspapers in Denmark, Germany (democratic corporatist media), Italy, Spain (polarized pluralist media), UK and USA (liberal media) were contented analysed. The findings shows that the three media systems use different frame to debate about the crisis. For what concerns tone and issues, differences are significant among countries, due their cultural traditions, rather than among media systems.