MEDIATIZED EU

The media framing of politics significantly shapes the features of political modernity. This discursive mediatization signifies a cultural shift in modern politics and is often driven by political preferences, as well as economic policies that underline media action. In such conditions, news coverage often tends towards a more cynical representation of politics, and the public becomes more alienated from political processes and the media. Scholars term this the “spiral of cynicism,” or, in the context of EU news, a “spiral of Euroscepticism” (Galpin & Trenz, 2016, 2). The latter is reflected in the ongoing shift from “permissive consensus” to “constraining dissensus” (Hooghe and Marks, 2008) in public support of European integration. Media framing of the European project thus plays a crucial role in constructing citizens’ perceptions of the EU and European identity and attitudes towards EU enlargement. The MEDIATIZED EU project aims to study how the media discourses are constructed to foster or hamper the European project and how they resonate among the public by focusing on the elite-media-public triangle. We believe it is crucial to reveal the specifics of such mediatization of political discourses on Europeanization across Europe, namely, the so-called Old and New European and EaP countries. We will take a comprehensive mixed-methods approach with qualitative, quantitative and deliberative research components. We will integrate desk research to review the transformations of media discourses since the start of the 21st century, content analysis and critical discourse analysis of the current media discourses, in-depth interviews with political and media elites, nation-wide representative surveys of the population, and finally, deliberative discussions with relevant publics in the target countries. The project will provide a cross-country comparative analysis of seven target countries, as well as develop policy recommendations for national and EU policymakers.