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News media representations of a common EU foreign and security policy. A cross-national content analysis of CFSP coverage in national quality newspapers

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

This study is a cross-national comparative content analysis of the broadsheet press coverage of EU Common Foreign and Security issues (n=1453) focusing on the presence of indicators of a European Public Sphere. Specifically, we investigated the visibility of Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) stories, featuring actors, the tone of coverage and the presence of ‘risk’ and ‘opportunity’ frames. We found that CFSP was more visible in broadsheets during key events. In terms of actors in the news, coverage was primarily Europeanized. When evaluative, CFSP news had a distinctive, positive dimension, especially with reference to the European Union (EU) as an entity. CFSP issues were more frequently framed in terms of ‘opportunity’ rather than in terms of ‘risk’. Our findings suggest that the news coverage of CFSP is truly different from the coverage of EU affairs in general. Implications for the formation of public opinion and the legitimacy of CFSP are discussed.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that we examine news media coverage of issues that fall under the auspices of the second institutional pillar of the EU, that of a Common EU Foreign and Security Policy and not Europe's foreign policy and external relations in general. For the sake of brevity we refer to that as ‘CFSP issues’.

  2. The study was funded by Riksbankens research foundation.

  3. For a discussion see Risse (2002).

  4. The Danish Dagbladet Børsen, though a business national daily, was included because it was the only newspaper available.

  5. We retrieved all articles that contained at least one of the following terms (in translation): EU Common Foreign and Security Policy, EU Security and Defence Policy, EU Common Foreign Policy, EU Common Defence Policy, EU Common Security Policy, European(EU) Security Strategy, Petersberg Tasks, European (EU) battle groups, European (EU) army/military, High Representative/ Javier Solana. Keywords were translated by native speakers. Articles were collected using online archives. The authors thank Factiva for providing access to the content of Polish newspapers and El Pais. As no Greek broadsheet was available via online archives, articles were collected with via the newspapers’ website. The same applies for the FAZ. Articles that were either duplicates or were not sufficiently relevant were excluded from the analysis.

  6. The reliability for the Polish newspapers was tested with a sample 20 articles because of the small sample retrieved for Poland.

  7. Indicators of importance were duration, space of information about the actor, frequency of being quoted and statements of the actor.

  8. Please note that ‘EU supranational actors’ include EU leaders and EU Ministers at Council level. When EU representatives were referred to with their national function they were coded as ‘actors from other EU member-states’.

  9. Before performing PCA the suitability of data for factor analysis was assessed. The Kaiser-Meyer-Oklin value was 0.74, much higher than the minimum value and Barlett's Test of Spheristicity reached statistical significance, thus supporting the factorability of the correlation matrix. PCA revealed two components with eigenvalues more than 1, explaining 54.4 per cent of the variance. First factor (opportunity frame): ‘positive quote’=0.65, ‘rational pro’=0.81, ‘CFSP beneficial’=0.82, ‘positive evaluation’=0.77. Second factor (risk frame): ‘negative quote’=0.7, ‘rational contra’=0.72, ‘CFSP detrimental’=0.72, ‘negative evaluation’=0.67.

  10. It should be noted that with the exception of France and Germany we identified cases of newspaper-specific divergence in the patterns of visibility. For reasons of simplicity results are not displayed here but are available from the authors upon request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Market Research Institute, Athens

    Anna-Angela Kandyla

  2. University of Amsterdam, Kloveniersburgwal 48, Amsterdam, 1012 CX, The Netherlands

    Claes de Vreese

Authors
  1. Anna-Angela Kandyla
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  2. Claes de Vreese
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Appendix

Appendix

See Table A1.

Table A1 Inter coder reliability measures
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Figure A1
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Visibility of CFSP stories for year 2001. Graph points refer to mean number of articles per month in each country.

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Figure A2
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Visibility of CFSP stories for year 2002. Graph points refer to mean number of articles per month in each country.

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Figure A3
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Visibility of CFSP stories for year 2003. Graph points refer to mean number of articles per month in each country.

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Figure A4
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Visibility of CFSP stories for year 2004. Graph points refer to mean number of articles per month in each country.

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Figure A5
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Visibility of CFSP stories for year 2005. Graph points refer to mean number of articles per month in each country.

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Kandyla, AA., de Vreese, C. News media representations of a common EU foreign and security policy. A cross-national content analysis of CFSP coverage in national quality newspapers. Comp Eur Polit 9, 52–75 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2009.10

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