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ABSTRACT
Despite embracing the rhetoric of transnational flows and networks, comparative research on media content continues to fall prey to methodological nationalism. When it comes to empirical measurement, researchers often, despite their best intentions, fall back on techniques that assume that the discourses circulating within particular nationally bounded communicative spaces are homogenous. In this article, we developed a set of propositions and analytical approaches that should help to overcome this impasse, and used them to examine the newspaper debates on the EU Constitutional Treaty in seven European states: the Czech Republic, Germany, France, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Switzerland, and the UK. We suggested that instead of focusing solely on comparisons between nationally bounded communicative spheres, we should also look at differences between class-related communicative spaces. By adopting such an approach, we can acknowledge both sub-national segmentations of communicative spaces and transnational linkages, while at the same time not losing sight of the importance of the national. The results support our initial contention that the research on European mass communication ought to move beyond comparisons between national units and the levels of their respective Europeanization, and examine how European issues are conveyed in media catering to different social classes.
Notes
*This paper arises from a research project financed by the Economic and Social Research Council (Award RES-000-22-1430). A British Academy Visiting Fellowship made it possible to extend the scope of the project to the Czech republic and Slovakia.
1Despite choosing to focus on class, we do not deny the existence and importance of other lines of social division – such as those of gender, ethnicity and age – which give rise to a further segmentation of mass communicative spaces. However, for pragmatic reasons to do with access to sources, we were forced to limit our analysis exclusively to the inter-related segmentation of mass communication along the lines of class and nation.
3The online newspaper archives did not always reproduce the whole of the content of print newspapers. However, as these sources were only used in the case of countries for which we achieved a fairly high coverage of the overall press market (the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia), we deemed the sample to be representative enough.
4Calculated from the data of the Czech Publishers Association, http://www.uvdt.cz/Default.aspx?section=31&server=1&article=108, accessed: 27th June 2006. The data are from August 2005.
5Calculated from the data of the Slovak Audit Bureau of Circulations, http://www.abcsr.sk/index.php?menu=kancelaria, accessed: 27th June 2006. The data are from August 2005.
6Calculated from World Asssociation of Newspapers 2005 and http://media.guardian.co.uk/circulationfigures/tables/0,,1756045,00.html, accessed: May 1, 2006.
7Calculated from World Asssociation of Newspapers 2005, http://213.23.100.232/Wemf/de/Auflagen05/ (accessed May 1, 2006; Switzerland) and http://www.ojd.com/fr/adhchif/adhe_list.php?mode=chif&cat=1771 (accessed: May 1, 2006; France).
8A complete list of the used keywords can be found under http://gdwg.de/eu/data.html. For a more detailed description of the coding process, see Koenig 2006).
9For reasons to do with differences between languages and the cultural repertoires drawn upon in particular states, it may not be reliable to draw conclusions based on the comparisons of the amounts of individual positions across different states. Due to that, we limited our discussion to conclusions that can be inferred on the basis of comparing the amounts of competing positions within individual states (e.g., the amount of welfare state vs. neoliberalist positions in France), and on the basis of comparing the differences between two competing positions across states (e.g., the difference in the amount of welfare state vs. neoliberalist positions in France compared to the difference in the amount of welfare state vs. neoliberalist positions in the UK).
10The relatively high amount of articles dealing with Luxemburg, represented in the media by its Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, was undoubtedly caused by the fact that Luxemburg had served the European Presidency in the first half of 2005.
11The only exception from this ‘rule’ is the case of the Czech Republic, which gets quoted – even though only very slightly – in all the three western European countries, much because of the controversial statements of the Czech president Vaclav Klaus on the address of the EU. These statements, including his proposal that Kazachstan should become a member of the EU, or his later call for the EU to dissolve itself, earned him a media label of ‘a eurosceptic’ and partly explain also the relatively high number of references to Czech politicians in Slovak and Slovenian press.
12Slovenian and Slovak newspapers were the ones in the sample which devoted more articles to politicians from some other country than from their own. The media in the remaining four states clearly complied with the principle of ‘homocentrism’ (Fowler Citation1991), as they were primarily focused on their home country when reporting about the EUCT; the largest amount of articles mentioned local political elites, while every other countries came second. This is hardly surprising in case of the French media, the stage of arguably the most vivid and, at the same time, most polarised debates about the constitution of all the EU countries, but perhaps less expected in case of the Czech republic, where the politicians have not even decided about the term of the referendum.
13Question of why had the media coverage of the EU Constitution debates left behind some other countries, who, because of the size of their population and the economic power, could also claim membership to that ‘elite club’ (namely Italy and Spain), could be answered with the help of the fact that the EUCT was ratified in both countries prior to the starting point of our sample (1st May 2005).