Old ties from a new(s) perspective: Diversity in the Dutch press coverage of the 2006 general election campaign

摘要

This study examines the extent to which the highly diverse and volatile Dutch electorate received a diverse offer of political newspaper coverage during the 2006 general election campaign. We measured the level of diver-sity of five subscription based national newspapers with a partisan history and two free dailies. Two forms of diversity were examined: party diversity (i. e., the distribution of attention to political parties) and issue diversity (i. e., the distribution of attention to issues). The diversity of party cover-age in the free dailies was greater than the diversity across all newspapers. Whereas free dailies paid a relatively large amount of attention to new and opposition parties, traditional newspapers paid a relatively large amount of attention to the parties with whom they were aligned during the period of "pillarization". Conversely, we only found small differences in the distri-bution of attention to issues. The diversity of issue coverage across newspa-pers was larger than the diversity within newspapers.