Following Washington’s lead

Abstract

By examining the Dutch press’s reporting on the run-up to the war in Iraq this paper provides evidence that Dutch foreign news is structurally biased in favor of the interests of political and economic elites. Despite a priori plausibility and already existing supporting evidence, this observation is rarely made in the scholarship, in part because the Dutch field of communication scholarship lacks a coherent political-economic perspective. This paper then presents empirical evidence for the relevance of the Anglo-American tradition of political economy to the study of the media in a continental European country.