Legitimated Persons and Vox Populi attitude towards Europe in French, Italian, Polish and UK TV news (original) (raw)

European Identity: What the Media Say

2012

Reviewed by Oana ARDELEANU 1 We live in an age when, at the European level, many of us are concerned with the dichotomy: national identity vs. European identity. The extent to which we preserve our local heritage or, on the contrary, we borrow more from what is believed to be a European collective identity-turned into a hotly-debated topic that often divided opinion. The co-editors Paul Bayley and Geoffrey Williams, in their volume European Identity. What the Media Say, take a closer look into this matter, trying to investigate how Europe is represented by both written and spoken news media in four European countries-United Kingdom, France, Italy and Poland-from a linguistic point of view. To do so, they analysed a large electronic corpus put together from newspapers and TV news transcripts, within their IntUne project, known under the title "Integrated and United: A Quest for Citizenship in an Ever Closer Europe", making use of various comparative methodologies. The aim of this initiative was to prove how linguistic analysis can bring a major contribution to the analysis of political issues. In what follows, I will provide an overview of the ten chapters of the book, tagged along by some evaluative remarks.

Ruud Koopmans and Paul Statham (eds), The Making of a European Public Sphere: Media Discourses and Political Contention

European Journal of Communication, 2011

This edited volume sets out to examine the Europeanization of media discourse vis-à-vis advancing European integration and to explore its relation to political practice and the 'European democratic deficit'. The studies presented investigate patterns of communication and interaction that emerge alongside institutional and policy regulation at the EU level and these are used to draw conclusions about how conditions of Europeanization, transnationalism and globalization affect the ways democratic politics is performed.

Meyer, Jan-Henrik 2010. The European public sphere. Media and transnational communication in European integration 1969-1991. (Studies on the History of European Integration Vol. 10). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.

2010

The traumatic failure of the European constitution seems to underpin doubts about a European public sphere that effectively interacts with the European Union and holds it to account. Is a European public sphere truly impossible? Has it been emerging as many social scientists have claimed – however only on the basis of more recent observations? This dissertation provides the first long-term historical analysis of a political European public sphere and its development over time. Starting out from a thorough consideration of the theoretical, conceptual and methodological innovations provided by social scientists in recent years, the study focuses on how British, French and German quality newspapers covered major European Council summits from The Hague in 1969 to Maastricht in 1991. Findings - based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of both reporting and commentary using a variety of methods - suggest that major events of European integration have long been accompanied by a vivid debate in the media. Moreover, the European public sphere underwent a notable structural transformation. The growth of a more developed European political system since the 1970s has led to a more politicised, more differentiated, more inclusive – and hence potentially more democratic – European public sphere in terms of participation in the debate and the range of issues covered. There was a notable increase in transnational communication. A discourse analysis of the commentary demonstrates changes in European identification – from a rather uniform association of Europe with progress to overcome the nation state towards a greater pluralism in European self-understanding, including Euro-scepticism, but also a sense of greater European responsibility in the post-Cold War world. The study suggests that an emerging European public sphere was much more responsive to the development of European integration than has previously been assumed.

Establishing the EU: The Representation of Europe In the Press In 1993 and 2005

… : pragmatics and discourse: papers from the …, 2009

This paper investigates how the European Union was represented in three British newspapers over two different time periods: 1993 and 2005. The Treaty on European Union, which led to the creation of the European Union, was signed in 1992 and entered into force in 1993. The Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe was signed in 2004, and like the Maastricht Treaty was subject to ratification. However, unlike the Maastricht Treaty, it was rejected in referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005 and therefore was not implemented. These two events were chosen for their importance in the history of the European Union and because they allow for a diachronic comparison of the construal of Europe in the British press. Two sub-corpora were used in the study, the first, SiBol_93, contains approximately 92 million tokens from three broadsheet British newspapers collected in 1993 and the second, SiBol_05, contains approximately 150 million tokens collected from the same sources in 2005. Each of these corpora covers the year after the signing of the treaties and therefore the period in which the ratification was discussed. The corpora were investigated using Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) which involves a shunting between quantitative and qualitative analytical approaches and starting points (see, for example, Partington 2004, forthcoming; Baker 2006). Our findings show that while there is no simplistic positive to negative reversal of evaluation, there is certainly a marked decrease in the newsworthiness of Europe and the European Union, and the problem the European Union faces is primarily one of visibility.

European integration in Italian and British newspaper discourse

2010

Chapter 1 mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Introduction. 1 Chapter 2. Literature Review. 7 2.1 An introduction to discourse. 7 2.2 Conceptualising the history of Europe. 9 2.3 The post-World War II European project of integration. 2.4 Integration: the euro and constitutionalisation. 2.5 Towards a public sphere for Europe? 2.6 The European Union's communication deficit. 2.7 The British Eurosceptic Press. 2.8 Europe's constitutionalisationand newspaper coverage. 2.9 Field and Comparative theory: the architecture for a political communications analysis. Habitus, ideology and Weltanschauungen in the context of national identity and nationalism. Comparative theory. 2.10 The post-World War II intertwining of Italian politics and the press. 94 96 3.13 Categories for analysis of news stories. 3.14 Categories for analysis of commentary pieces. 3.15 Research Texts: A-C Chapter 4. Interviewsthe last layers of context. ITALY: field and comparative analysis: 4.1 Europe, economics and globalisation. 4.2 The EU constitutionand the future of Europe. 4.3 The Italian peopleenthusiastic over Europe? 4.4 Are Italians well-informed over Europe? 4.5 An EU communication deficit in Italylanguage. 4.6 IL GIORNALE journalistic field. BRITAIN: field and comparative analysis: 4.7 Europe, economics and globalisation. Britain's recent 'contribution.' 4.8 The EU constitutionand the future of Europe: British perspectives. 4.9 The British peopleenthusiastic over Europe? 4.10 The Iraq Waras Context. 4.11 An EU communication deficit in Britainlanguage. 4.12 Are the British well-informed over Europe? V. 4.13 THE TIMES journalistic field. 4.14 Conclusions.