The exceptional election: Press coverage of Clinton and Trump in Italy, Sweden and the UK

Us elections are an important international event that produce consequences affecting many countries in different parts of the world. The election campaign itself attracts worldwide attention not just because of the importance of the competition but also because very often journalists like to stress strange and in some way “exotic” aspects of the campaign. This is particularly the case of the 2016 election campaign with two major competitors, Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton, presenting very specific features. Trump is a sort of “outsider” who so far has run against his own Republican Party and Clinton is the first woman running for the Presidency. Our paper presents the findings from a comparative content analysis of the coverage of the 2016 election campaign in a sample of the British, Italian and Swedish press. These are countries that feature different models of journalism (liberal, democratic-corporatist and polarized- pluralist). In each country we analyze newspapers of different type (elite, tabloid and local newspapers) and different affiliation (center/left – liberal, center/right- conservative). The study has a twofold aim: on one side we want to study how the election campaign is covered in different countries and therefore we investigate if and how different media systems and different political cultures determine different media coverage. On the other side we will focus on factors that overcome national boundaries such as different political affiliations and different types of newspapers. Particular attention will be paid to the most frequent frames of the coverage and their connection to different political cultures and existing stereotypes.