Indicating mediatization? Two decades of election campaign television coverage

<jats:p> This article traces mediatization in the coverage of election campaigns in Danish and German television news over the past 20 years (1990–2009). The analysis is based on news content analyses focusing on the major candidates in the two countries. Considering that Denmark and Germany are similar but nevertheless different countries, the data show remarkable similarities in the coverage of elections and how it changes over time. Observing the amount of horse-race coverage, personalization, visualization and negativity, most findings fitted the mediatization hypothesis at a first glance. At a second glance, multivariate analyses controlling for important other variables confirmed the notion of mediatization for only three of the five content indicators studied. In addition, the mediatization process apparently stalled in the 1990s. </jats:p>