Framing the Iraq war: a cross-national comparison of newspaper framing in four Western countries

In this paper we compare the newspaper attention for and framing
of the Iraq issue in four Western countries (US, UK, Germany and the
Netherlands) during the period September 2002 until August 2003.
Using computer assisted coding based on wordlists constructed by
human coders, we analyzed more than 70,000 articles from 12 news-
papers. We pose the question how framing differs across countries,
time and newspapers. Our results confirm the vast majority of our
hypotheses and demonstrate that the national political context, the
political leaning of newspapers and the stage of the conflict can
account for a large amount of the variation in the attention for the
issue and in the way it is presented.