Daniel Hallin

Hallin's research concerns journalism, political communication, and the comparative analysis of media systems. He has written on the media and war, including Vietnam, Central America, and the Gulf War. He has written on television coverage of elections, demonstrating the shrinking "sound bite" and offering an interpretation of its meaning for political journalism, and on the rise and decline of journalist professionalism in the United States.  In recent years, he has turned his attention to the comparative analysis of media systems, focusing on Western Europe and on Latin America, and trying to bring into political communication and media studies the tradition of comparative historical and institutional analysis that can be found in sociology and comparative politics. His book Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics, co-authored with Paolo Mancini, won the Outstanding Book Awards of the International Communication and National Communication Associations, and the Goldsmith Book Award of the Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics at Harvard, and has been translated into ten languages. Most recently, Hallin has been doing research on health and medical reporting and the mediatization of health and medicine, working with the Berkeley Anthropologist Charles Briggs.  Their book, Making Health Public, originally published in 2016, came out in a second edition in August, 2024 with extensive new material on the COVID-19 pandemic.  Hallin has also focused in recent years on media systems in Latin America, often focusing on populism and anti-populism in the media. 

Ph.D. in Political Science, University of California, Berkeley (1980)

• Making Health Public: How News Coverage is Remaking Media, Medicine and Contemporary Life.  Routledge, 2016 and 2024. (with Charles L. Briggs)
• Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World (Cambridge University Press, 2012). (with Paolo Mancini)
• Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2006).  (with Paolo Mancini)
• We Keep America On Top of the World: Television Journalism and the Public Sphere (Routledge, 1994).
• The "Uncensored War": The Media and Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1986).
• "Media Systems in Latin America."  The Routledge Handbook of Political Communication in Iberoamerica in press.   (with Martín Echeverría)
• "The Societal Context of Professional Practice: Examining the Impact of Politics and Economics on Journalistic Role Performance across 37 Countries," Journalism, 2024. 
• “Journalistic Role Performance in Times of COVID,” Journalism Studies, 24(16):1977-1998, 2023.   
• "Whose Stories Are Told and Who is Made Responsible? Human-interest Framing in Health Journalism in Norway, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S.," Journalism 24(1): 3-21, 2023.   (with Tine Ustad Figenshou and Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud)
• “The Concept of Hybridity in Journalism Studies,” International Journal of Press/Politics 28(1): 219-237, 2023. (with Claudia Mellado and Paolo Mancini)
• "Press Freedom and Media Reform in a Populist Regime: How Ecuadorian Journalists and Policy Actors See the Correa Era," International Journal of Communication, 2021. (with Manel Palos-Pons)
• "Rethinking Mediatization:  Populism and the Mediatization of Politics," The Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism, Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord, Eds., pp. 49-58.  London: Routledge, 2021.
• "Biomedicalization and Media in Comparative Perspective: Audiences, Frames and Actors in Norwegian, Spanish, U.K. and U.S. Health News," International Journal of Press-Politics, 26(3): 699-718, 2021. (with Tine Ustad Figenshou and Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud)
• "Comparative Research, System Change, and the Complexity of Media Systems," International Journal of Communication, 14, 2020.
• "Press Freedom and Its Context," in Matthew J. Powers and Adrienne Russel, Eds., Rethinking Media Research for Changing Societies, pp. 53-64.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 
• "Mediatization, Neoliberalism and Populisms: The Case of Trump," Contemporary Social Science, 2018.
• "Serving Consumers, Citizens or Elites:  Democratic Roles of Journalism in Chilean Newspapers and Television News," International Journal of Press/Politics, 23(1): 24-43, 2018.  (with Claudia Mellado)
• "Ten Years After Comparing Media Systems: What Have We Learned?"  Political Communication 34(2): 155-171, 2017. (with Paolo Mancini)
• "Transcending the Medical/Media Opposition in Research on Media Coverage of Health and Medicine.” Media, Culture & Society, 37(1): 85-100, 2015.    (with Marisa Brandt and Charles L. Briggs)
• "Biomedicalization and the Public Sphere: Newspaper Coverage of Health and Medicine, 1960s-2000s." Social Science & Medicine 96 (2013): 121-128 (with Charles L. Briggs)
• "Health Reporting as Political Reporting: Biocommunicability and the Public Sphere," Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism, Vol. 11(2), 2010.
• "Not the End of Journalism History," Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism Vol. 10(3): 332-334, 2009.
• “Biocommunicability: The Neoliberal Subject and its Contradictions in News Coverage of Health Issues,” Social Text, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Winter 2007):43-66.
• "How States, Markets and Globalization Shape the News: The French and U.S. National Press, 1965-1997," European Journal of Communication, 22(1), March, 2007: 27-48.
• “The Passing of the 'High Modernism’ of American Journalism Revisited,” Political Communication Report, 16(1), Winter, 2006.
• "Field Theory, Differentiation Theory, and Comparative Media Research" in Rodney Benson and Erik Neveu, eds., Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field. London: Polity Press, 2005.
• "Political Clientelism and the Media: Southern Europe and Latin America in Comparative Perspective," Media, Culture & Society, 24(2), 2002.
• "La Nota Roja: Popular Journalism and the Transition to Democracy in Mexico," in Colin Sparks and John Tulloch (Eds.), Tabloid Tales. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
• "Media, Political Power and Democratization in Mexico," in James Curran and Myung-Jin Park (Eds) De-Westernizing Media Studies. London: Routledge, 2000.
• "Commercialism and Professionalism in the American News Media," in James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (Eds.), Mass Media and Society, Third Edition (London: Arnold, 2000).
• "Agon and Ritual: The Gulf War as Popular Culture and as Television Drama," Political Communication, 10:4 (October-December, 1993). (With Todd Gitlin).
• "Sourcing Patterns of National Security Reporters," Journal­ism Quarterly, 70:4 (Winter, 1994). (With Robert Karl Manoff and Judy K. Weddle).
• "The Passing of the 'High Modernism' of American Journalism," Journal of Communication, 42:3 (Summer, 1992).
• "Sound Bite News: Television Coverage of Elections, 1968-1988," Journal of Communication, 42:2 (Spring, 1992).
• "Speaking of the President: Political Structure and Repre­sentational Form in U.S. and Italian TV News," Theory and Society, 13 (1984).
• "The Media, the War in Vietnam and Political Support: A Critique of the Thesis of an Oppositional Media," Journal of Politics, 46 (1984).