Media Framing of Copenhagen Tourism: A New Approach to Public Opinion about Tourists
Media Framing of Copenhagen Tourism: A New Approach to Public Opinion about Tourists
The travel guide publisher Lonely Planet appointed Copenhagen as the top city to travel to in 2019, which attracted wide attention in the Danish media. Media framing plays an important role in the public perception of tourism issues. This study analyzes the possible relationships between seven frame contents and six frame implications across 225 Danish newspaper stories published from 2017 to 2019. The framing of media stories may give rise to particular thoughts that have profound effects on how people perceive issues and problems and how best to deal with them. Introducing a new quantitative approach to content analysis, which includes a combination of binary coding, optimal scaling, and path analysis, this study provides the first analysis of relationships between frame contents and implications in tourism.
The results uncover several significant relationships between frame contents and implications and also suggest that ‘article appearance’ and ‘article authorship’ moderate some of the relationships. Among other implications, the results contribute to the ongoing debate about over-tourism by showing how positive tourist-related events may reduce demand for fewer tourists and tourist activities. Overall, the findings of the content analysis may be highly useful to those interested in public opinion about tourism issues. Consequently, further research on tourism could proceed along this avenue by using various forms of data, such as newspaper, social media, and/or television.
Hansen, Torben (2020), Media framing of Copenhagen tourism: A new approach to public opinion about tourists, Annals of Tourism Research, 84, 13 pages.
Read the full article here