Supervisors: Irene Pollach & John Thøgersen
Discussants: Carsten Bergenholtz & Marija Banovic

Abstract
Mass media not only inform the public about local, national, and global affairs, but also shape people’s perceptions of current events (Beattie et al., 2021). In most countries, the mass media rely heavily on advertising revenues these days, as income from news subscriptions is declining (Germano & Meier, 2013; Beattie et al., 2017). At the same time, statistics show a decreasing trend in advertising income, which puts economic constraints especially on commercial newspapers (Lischka et al., 2017). This raises the question whether these economic pressures lead daily newspapers to bias news about their advertisers in their advertisers’ favor for fear of losing the revenues they provide. Therefore, the goal of this PhD project is to examine whether and how newspapers slant business news in favor of their advertisers by conducting a surface-level quantitative analysis on an extensive dataset of news articles and advertising data from Denmark, Germany, and Great Britain, followed by more in-depth quantitative and qualitative content analyses within the realm of news discourse.

Everyone is welcome!