Nordic newspapers on the EU

Abstract

Previous studies (by the author of this article) on coverage of the EU in 1993 and 1996 by four leading Nordic newspapers generated three theoretical categories for a `European political journalism'. The categories were named participation, legitimacy and mondialization/universalism. The present study revisited the same Nordic newspapers over 10 years later in 2005, shortly before and after the referenda on the proposed new EU Constitution in France and the Netherlands, to test the validity of these categories. Generally speaking, the same conceptual landscape still applies to Nordic journalism on the EU, but some of the empirical material seemed to demand the new category of `identity'. This category seemed to be linked both to threats to national identity and to the loss of an emerging `core European identity'. The article suggests that the core category of journalism's sense-making about the EU is the question of `participation'. This core category is grounded on the classical Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft distinctions. The three other important categories — legitimacy, mondialization and identity — can be seen as supporting categories in the analysis of media coverage of the European Union. Within this general and normative conceptual frame, there are remarkable differences in the way the Nordic newspapers contribute to such European political journalism.