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Begin New Search Topic Mass Media Publishing Institution The Kolleg-Forschergruppe (KFG)

1. Mission Impossible - Why Crisis Management Missions Do Not Increase the Visibility of the European Union

Author:
Stephanie B. Anderson
Publication Date:
12-2013
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Kolleg-Forschergruppe (KFG)
Abstract:
The European Union's (EU) Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and its accompanying Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) missions are tools used to increase the international profile of the EU. Using three different databases, this study features a content analysis that evaluates how much and what kind of media coverage CSDP missions receive. In general, the news coverage is positive, but limited. This article argues that the problem is structural: the very nature of the missions themselves, whether EU or NATO, makes them poor vehicles for EU promotion for political, institutional, and logistical reasons. By definition, they are conducted in the middle of crises, making news coverage politically sensitive. The very act of reporting could undermine the mission. Institutionally, all CSDP missions are intergovernmental; therefore, the member states control the coverage. Logistically, the missions are usually located in remote, undeveloped parts of the world, making it difficult and expensive for European and international journalists to cover. Moreover, these regions in crisis seldom have a thriving, local free press. The author concludes that although a mission may do good, CSDP missions cannot fulfill their primary political function of raising the profile of the EU.
Topic:
NATO, Mass Media, and Governance
Political Geography:
Europe and United Nations

2. Grounding the European Public Sphere. Looking Beyond the Mass Media to Digitally Mediated Issue Publics

Author:
Lance Bennett
Publication Date:
08-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Kolleg-Forschergruppe (KFG)
Abstract:
The gold standard for discussing public spheres has long been established around mass media, with the prestige print press given a privileged place. Yet when it comes to a European public sphere, the mass media are also problematic, or at least incomplete, in several ways: relatively few EU-wide issues are replicated in the national media of EU countries, the discourses on those issues are dominated primarily by elites (with relatively few civil society voices included in the news), and public attention is seldom paid to EU issues beyond a select few (money, agriculture, political integration, scandals), creating a distant 'gallery public.' At the same time, many important political issues such as trade and economic justice, development policy, environment and climate change policy, human rights, and military interventions, among others, are being addressed more actively by networks of civil society actors both within and across EU national borders. These networks utilize the Internet and various interactive digital media to publicize their issues, engage active publics, and contest competing policy perspectives not only within specific issue networks, but across solidarity networks involving other policy issues, and with political targets at national and EU levels. This dimension of the EU public sphere has received relatively little attention from observers, and when it has been explored, it is often dismissed as less inclusive, and therefore less significant than the somewhat reified mass media model. This analysis compares networked, digitally mediated public issue spheres with the mass mediated model, points out ways in which the two types of public sphere are complementary, and also shows how networked issue spheres may be the sites of greater citizen and civil society engagement in keeping with more classical models of public spheres.
Topic:
Civil Society, Science and Technology, and Mass Media
Political Geography:
Europe

3. Emotions, Media Discourse and the Mobilization of Citizens: Conceptual Considerations and a Plausibility

Author:
Marianne van de Steeg
Publication Date:
10-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Kolleg-Forschergruppe (KFG)
Abstract:
The political game in the European Union has changed. Nowadays, EU issues are politicized in the public mass arena and demand from the European leadership more than the traditional, thin top-down communication. Concerns about the European democratic deficit and the legitimacy of the EU have made it important to engage citizens in EU issues and actively win their support.
Topic:
Civil Society, Regional Cooperation, and Mass Media
Political Geography:
Europe

4. The Emergence of a European Community of Communication: Insights from Empirical Research on the Europeanization of Public Spheres

Author:
Thomas Risse and Marianne van de Steeg
Publication Date:
08-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Kolleg-Forschergruppe (KFG)
Abstract:
A European public sphere emerges out of Europeanized national public spheres if the following two phenomena are verified. First, if and when the same (European) themes are discussed at the same time with similar frames of reference, meaning structures, and patterns of interpretation across the various media sources. Second, if and when a transnational community of communication emerges in which speakers and listeners recognize each other as legitimate participants in a discourse that frames the issues at stake as common European problems. We present empirical evidence from other scholars and two case studies of our own, namely Eastern enlargement and the sanctions against the Austrian ÖVP/FPÖ-government. The main finding is that at least when European issues are discussed, that a European public sphere is constituted and re-constituted through the discursive connections and debates across borders.
Topic:
Civil Society, Democratization, Regional Cooperation, and Mass Media
Political Geography:
Europe

5. How International Law Standards Pervade Discourse on the Use of Armed Force: Insights into European and US Newspaper Debates between 1990 and 2005

Author:
Swantje Renfordt
Publication Date:
05-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Kolleg-Forschergruppe (KFG)
Abstract:
For almost a decade, 'public legitimacy' has remained largely unaddressed in empirical international relations (IR) analyses of international legalization. Yet, this concept has behavioral consequences. IR scholars for long assume that a belief in the legitimacy of a norm may be one reason for a 'compliance pull' on the international stage. The present study addresses this gap. It suggests a sociological conception of legalization observable in mass media debates and encompassing law's 'public legitimacy', understood as the congruence between legal regulations and discursive practices to that effect that these rules are also accepted by the larger public. This conception is illustrated in European and US newspaper reporting about military interventions in the post-Cold War era (1990-2005). Based on a large-n media analysis, the study not only concludes that an 'international rule of law' frame is heavily diffused across the communicative practices of European and US public spheres. It also shows that two legal norms in particular – human rights and United Nations (UN) multilateralism – generate a shared sense of 'public legitimacy' across the six countries analyzed.
Topic:
International Law and Mass Media
Political Geography:
United States, Europe, and United Nations

6. Bringing the Mass Media in: The Contribution of the Mass Media for Understanding Citizens' Attitudes towards the European Union

Author:
Silke Adam
Publication Date:
09-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Kolleg-Forschergruppe (KFG)
Abstract:
Economic considerations, identity related considerations and cueing theory are used for explaining citizens' attitudes towards the European Union. Yet, all of this research has failed to show how elite cues on interests and identities actually reach the citizens. As a consequence, the author argues that domestic mass media as the most widely used source for citizens' information about the European Union has the potential to fill this missing link. Mass media actively construct reality by promoting ideas (agenda-setting and framing) and thereby shaping processes of socialization and persuasion. In this article the author discusses theoretical concepts of how mass media might affect citizens' attitudes, summarizes what we know about the role of domestic mass media in the course of EU integration, derives research desiderates and finally shows why knowledge on the link between mass media and citizens is paramount to understand the future of EU integration.
Topic:
Civil Society, Economics, Regional Cooperation, and Mass Media
Political Geography:
Europe