Is There a European Public Sphere?

Abstract

Recently, it has been argued that, despite the absence of European-wide mass media, a European public sphere is emerging, as some issues of European relevance become debated at the same time with the same intensity and with recourse to the structures of meaning throughout the entire European Union. This article examines the media framing of Silvio Berlusconi's controversial address as president of the European Council of Ministers to the European Parliament on 2 July 2003, in which he compared the Social Democrat MEP Martin Schulz to a kapò, an auxiliary concentration camp guard. The data are drawn from six EU countries, the US, Canada and Switzerland and show that while the reporting of the speech do satisfy two of Schlesinger's three criteria for the development of a European public sphere – the existence of a Europe-wide news agenda that is part of everyday media consumption of large audiences across nation-states – the data do not indicate a European transcendence of national public spheres.

Taking a Break. Some Thoughts about Media Consumption

“…Doing so helps such individuals to overcome a feeling of isolation (Greenwood and Long 2009) and continue to be involved in the life of those whom they left. Research also shows that media consumption has the ability to develop a sense of community (Downey and Koenig 2006) and hand in hand with the social media they encourage social integration, affording diffusion of information and knowledge about values, meanings, and identity. They also support linguistic preservation, communicative competence and the reduction of loneliness aroused by social distances (Arnold and Schneider 2007).…”

“…But today we generate information at a faster rate than we are able to consume it. This situation has been called "infoglu," "data smog" or "information overload," and its implications are that a sense of pressure is engendered that can influence the work quality of individuals and organizations (Hahn, Lawson and Lee 1992;Shenk 1997;Eppler and Mengis 2004;McShane and Von Glinow 2005;Thomas et al 2006). If so, it is suggested that cutting off allow individuals to recover a bit from the amount of data engulfing them, to rest by taking time out, and then to "plug themselves back in" to the media flow.…”

Which European Public Sphere?

“…As a consequence, the recent literature has become more empirically-oriented and has focused on media coverage to establish the degree of Europeanisation of public communication over time and/or across Downloaded by [Australian National University] at 21:43 04 June 2016 countries. Many of these studies have narrowed down their analysis on public debates about specifi c European issues at given points in time -cases in point are, for instance, the Haider debate (Berkel 2006;van de Steeg 2006), EU Eastern enlargement in general (Adam 2007;van de Steeg 2002) and Turkish EU accession in particular (Wimmel 2004), the EU constitution (Adam 2007), EU summits (Meyer 2010), the EU Commission's corruption scandal (Trenz 2000), or the BerlusconiSchulz case (Downey and Koenig 2006) -but two recent large-scale collaborative research projects have off ered a cross-sectional and longitudinal examination of the overall paĴ erns of public communication in the national media (Wessler et al 2008;Koopmans and Statham 2010a). 2 Despite this impressive accumulation of empirical evidence over the last years, there remains disagreement on how to measure Europeanised communication in the various national public spheres.…”

EU governance and European identity

“…The study by Downey and König (2006) indicates that even if there is an obvious European reference, such as in the Berlusconi-Schulz case, similar framing of events does not occur in a way that would encourage deliberation among citizens, since the actors involved in the conflict are portrayed as representatives of ethnic nations Living Reviews in European Governance http://www.livingreviews.org/lreg-2009-2 rather than their respective political parties. Consequently, ethnicity shows more perseverance than expected, and makes deliberative change of opinion due to communication difficulties (Downey and König 2006: 165-187).…”