Europe, the Crisis, and the Internet by Dennis Nguyen

Author:Dennis Nguyen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

The EU category includes the Council, Commission, EUROZONE Portal, and European Parliament . They were chosen for their central relevance in the design and implementation of EU politics and crisis strategies. The selection of news media outlets was grounded in preceding deliberations on their role in political debates on Europe. To find evidence for discursive convergence /integration and contrast media frames with those of other public communicators, the sample covered four news media brands from different parts of the EU: the British Guardian Online , French Le Monde Online, German Spiegel Online , and the English version of the Greek news website EKathimerini . Each one produced large amounts of content on EU/Europe-related issues and provided access to local political media arenas. The publications were either taken from the websites’ EU sections or, where no such section existed, were identified through an advanced keyword search for Europe, European Union , EU, and Eurozone (-crisis). The sample of governments was also based on a conscious choice, as some of the most important and influential member states in discourses on the crisis and Europe were selected, which are the UK, Germany , and Greece . The sub-sample of think tanks should cover at least two different perspectives on Europe and it included one slightly pro-European and one Eurosceptic communicator to reflect the diversity of opinions in this category. A similar sampling strategy applied for the selection of European NGOs and independent platforms, so that both pro-European and Eurosceptic perspectives were covered. The four individual bloggers were filtered with the same parameters and “independent” means in this context that the communicators are individuals who comment on political issues from a personal perspective on a platform that is not part of any official web presence, though they might be associated with a political organisation (e.g. a party). To further filter the final set of research subjects an additional temporal frame was set: only content that was published between March 2011 and March 2013 was included. The reason for choosing this period was to cover some of the most decisive development and events of the financial and political crisis in Europe, such as the referendum debate in the UK , the intensification of the crisis in Greece , Spain , and Cyprus , and the resulting tensions between member states (North–South divide ) in the EU.

In a first stage the complete sample was subject to a quantitative content analysis (N1 = 13,080), before a second sample N2 (= 1347) was pseudo-randomly selected for an in-depth examination in the secondary analysis. It is “pseudo-random” as each month of the set time frame should be sufficiently covered by the analysis, but individual publications were randomly selected within a month from the respective platforms. 5 N2 still covers roughly 10% of the larger sample and ensures the representability of findings. At this second stage the sampling excluded publications on sports and other cultural stories with no clear link to EU politics, since it is assumed that these genres rarely included relevant frame elements .

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