ABSTRACT
Richard Ericson et al.’s discussion of content analysis is driven by the commitment to understand the relationship of news texts, as an expressive cultural form, to social order, and to indicate the complex and variable nature of this relationship. It is important to establish the proportion of total news content that involves crime, law, and justice stories, and how this varies by medium and market. A related question is how concordant stories of crime, law, and justice are across news outlets. Critics might also contend that the questions we have posed cannot be addressed adequately through a reading of news content, but instead must be grounded in an understanding of the process by which the news is produced. Quantitative content analysis is further restricted in that it is limited to what can be quantified. What counts analytically is what can be counted.
