EU Politics on Television News: A Cross-National Comparative Study

Previous research tells us little about the ways in which the European Union is portrayed on main evening television news. We therefore content analyzed 11,722 stories broadcast in main evening television news in five EU countries over an 11-month period in 2000. There was an invisible importance to EU news: although the share of the news devoted to EU affairs was low, when EU news did appear it tended to be more prominent than other political news. We also found that the thematic structure of the EU news was similar across the countries and that EU coverage was not predominantly domestic in most of the countries. Evaluations of the EU were rare, but when they did appear they tended to be negative.