Mark Blach-Ørsten

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• Phd in Journalism
• Professor at Roskilde University

Research on issue ownership has placed political parties at the centre of studies. Recent research argues that this focus should be expanded. First, researchers have found that the salience of different political issues is affected by events exogenous to political parties, such as real-world events and societal trends. Second, researchers have poin...

Introduction to special issue

Digitalization has led to a crisis in news media and an upheaval in media ownership. A research concern has been that the motives driving media owners will shift from financial and public service to overtly political and ideological. The term “media capture” has been suggested to describe how various interests may take control over news media outle...

This chapter addresses political campaigning in relation to media systems theory. The baseline is 2004 when Hallin and Mancini published their seminal work, and media systems theory became a widespread backdrop for comparative political communication research. A first wave of studies had a strong focus on comparing political campaigns in countries...

The chapter “Nordic media welfare states from a comparative perspective: Unpacking audience fragmentation and polarization”, finds that Nordic news audiences are generally getting the same quality news provision and are likely to maintain the democratic prerequisites of Nordic media welfare states into the future.

Newspapers are so much more than news content. However, the history of journalism is typically told through studies of news genres or news epochs. In this article, we test the theory of three epochs of Danish press history in an explorative study of non-news genres, as exemplified by letters to the editor, editorials, and “celebratory items” on bir...

This edited volume compares experiences of how the Covid-19 pandemic was communicated in the Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The Nordic countries are often discussed in terms of similarities concerning an extensive welfare system, economic policies, media systems, and high levels of trust in societal actors. Howeve...

Nyhedsmedier, sociale medier og magt I Danmark spiller de traditionelle nyhedsmedier stadig en central rolle, når borgerne skal finde oplysninger om politik og samfund (Schrøder, Blach-Ør-sten og Eberholst, 2022), ligesom nyhedsmedierne spiller en aktiv rolle i dagsordenens fastsaettelse (Albaek & Green-Pedersen, 2020; Blach-Ørsten og Willig, 2016)...

Climate change is at the top of the public agenda, but researchers argue that climate journalism needs to be improved. However, knowledge of the public’s perceptions of and expectations for climate journalism is limited. We asked a representative sample of the Danish public (N = 2,028) about their views on climate journalism. The results showed tha...

This article analyzes news media scandals as critical incidents in journalism. A critical incident can be broadly understood as an event or development that reflects 'the hows and whys' of journalism. A part of the research into critical incidents studies these as occurrences that are made scandalous by journalistic misdeeds or ethical lapses. The...

This article examines press ethics across different news beats. Traditionally, studies of news beats have focused on the development, output or routines of a particular news beat, but few studies have focused on press ethics. In Denmark, the debate on press ethics began in the 1930s and has often focused on the crime beat. Today, the “Advisory rule...

Artiklen analyserer og diskuterer forandringer i det politiske informationslandskab i Danmark. Det politiske informationslandskab kan forstås som udbud og efterspørgsel af politiske nyheder og politisk information inden for et givet samfund. Artiklen fokuserer på udbuddet og efterspørgslen af (politiske) nyheder (offline, online og på de sociale me...

The article analyzes and discusses recent developments in the political information environment in Denmark, understood as the supply of and demand for political news and political information in a given society. The article focuses on the supply of and demand for (political) news by traditional news media and alternative news media, as offered offl...

The objective of this chapter is to describe and discuss some important political journalism development trends in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The term political journalism traditionally refers to news, commentaries, and other genres related to the coverage of political processes, institutions, and policy questions. It is, however, diffic...

While the number of think tanks in Denmark has increased considerably in recent decades, our knowledge about their visibility in political arenas is limited. The article explores how and why the mentions of private and public think tanks in the parliamentary and media arenas has developed from 2005 to 2018. Building on insights from previous studie...

In media systems theory, the Nordic countries are often held to constitute a specific media system (Brüggemann et al., 2014). In this article, we put this claim to the test in the area of news consumption. Based on findings about the four Nordic countries Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland in the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report (Newm...

Svingdørslobbyisme vokser i Danmark, uden at det har medført ny lovgivning. I flere lande, som Danmark normalt sammenligner sig med, har en lignende udvik-ling fundet sted og ført til ny lovgivning. Lovgivningen begrundes af isaer to over-ordnede hensyn: hensynet til den generelle tillid til det politiske system og hensy-net til beskyttelse af stat...

Svingdørslobbyisme vokser i Danmark, uden at det har medført ny lovgivning. I flere lande, som Danmark normalt sammenligner sig med, har en lignende udvikling fundet sted og ført til ny lovgivning. Lovgivningen begrundes af især to overordnede hensyn: hensynet til den generelle tillid til det politiske system og hensynet til beskyttelse af statens...

The revolving door between politics and lobbyism is growing in Denmark without this leading to any new legislation. In several countries, with which Denmark usually compares, similar developments have led to new legislation. The legislation is justified by two general considerations: protection of public trust in the political system and protection...

This article presents a study on special ministerial advisers examining their careers beyond their role in the machinery of government. Applying a theoretical framework derived from the literature on the sociology of work and the transformation of the organization of politics in the Nordic welfare states, we make two theoretical points. First, spec...

All political scandals trigger discussions of trust, but in a competitive commercial media climate, both important and minor legal offences and moral transgressions are regularly treated as scandalous media events. Today, actors in social media and mainstream media organizations can collaborate on cases that might develop into scandal news. In this...

In December of 2015 two major journalistic scandals hit the Danish news media. The two scandals ran almost concurrently, which increased the media attention and was reflected in the coverage. In a time of diminishing trust in the news media these scandals represented a significant and acute credibility problem for the news media that were affected....

The growth of PR in Scandinavia is linked both to the mediatisation of politics and to the decline of corporatism. Studies in Sweden and Norway suggest that one consequence of these changes is the increasing number of politicians who find new careers as lobbyists in the private sector. In this study, we have constructed a data set of all members of...

An increasingly complex hybrid system of social- and traditional-news media surrounds Nordic election campaigns as politically experienced incumbents favour traditional news media, and younger, lesser-known candidates’ social media. Despite little evidence for hybrid-media politicians, politicians’ media use is changing rapidly; 15%–16% of Danish c...

This article presents a first attempt to investigate the news content and news routines of Danish and Swedish news media covering the Öresund region. From a theoretical perspective, the Öresund region can be considered a possible best-case example of what is categorised as horizontal Europeanisation, in other words, of the potential for increased c...

Though think tanks have a long history internationally, they have especially in recent years come to play an increasingly important role in both policy-formulation and public debate. In this article, we analyse the growing presence of think tanks in a Danish context during the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, because in this national setting...

Medialisering er blevet et centralt begreb til at forstå mediernes samspil med kultur og samfund. Medierne spiller en voksende rolle inden for stadigt flere områder lige fra politik til familieliv. I takt hermed ændres betingelserne for menneskers kommunikation og indbyrdes interaktion, ligesom sociale relationer og organisationsformer påvirkes. D...

Credibility is frequently represented as both an ideal goal for journalism as a profession and as an integral part of the news industry’s survival strategy. Yet there is no widely accepted operationalization of the concept of credibility. In the current article, we present the results of a study of credibility in Danish news media. Credibility is d...

This study examines how media system differences in the form of news change or stay the same as newspapers in the United States (liberal), Denmark (democratic corporatist), and France (polarized pluralist) move from print to online. Internet technological affordances are posited to move online news toward more advertising and information (liberal m...

The authors conduct a comparative analysis of mediated political scandals in Norway, finland, Sweden and Denmark during the period 1980-2010. The most striking result is the increase of mediated political scandals during the last decade. The types of scandal increasing most since the millennium are norm transgressions concerning personal behaviour.

This article presents an overview of the political scandal in Denmark from 1980 to 2010. The article focuses on two kinds of scandal: The political scandal that concerns a minister or a politician’s transgressions within the realm of politics, and the norm scandal that concerns a minister or a politician’s personal transgressions either in the role...

On the basis of Scandinavian journalism research this article discusses the changing political roles of news organizations and journalists after the fall of the party press and the dissolution of broadcasting as a state-controlled monopoly. Given these institutional changes, we ask the following: what new roles, if any, are news organizations and j...

This chapter investigates the European news media’s change form being a national to also being a transnational political institution. The chapter will do this through a focus on Danish news media, since several studies of European news media point to Denmark as an especially successful example of Europeanization. Further, by looking at the norms an...

In the network society the boundaries between media, politics, economy and culture is put under pressure. The media is placed in an increasingly direct competition with the state, private companies, interest organisations etc. about the powers of definition within important spheres of society. This is illustrated by for instance “the Muhammad crisi...

This article focuses on the relationship between the media and the state in Denmark before and during the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. The media-state relationship in time of crisis and war is central to the discussion of the media's watchdog role in a democratic society. So far, studies of the war in Iraq have focused primarily on the m...

This article focuses on the Europeanization of the Danish news media. Europeanization of media content refers to two central criteria: a) an increased focus on European themes and actors, and b) an evaluation of theses themes and actors from a connation state dominated point of view. According to such criteria, recent studies across Europe, have do...