ARISTOTLE UNIVERSITY OF THESSALONIKI

SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATION

MASTER OF ARTS IN DIGITAL MEDIA,

COMMUNICATION & JOURNALISM

Pathway 2: European Journalism

Master Dissertation Theme: “Why isn’t EU so catchy in its citizens’ eyes? Focusing on the EU news, through the Greek case”

Panagiotis Bourchas

Supervisor: Pr. Christos Frangonikolopoulos

Thessaloniki, January 2021 Abstract

EU news is hierarchically very low in the daily interest of EU’s millions of citizens, who care more about the news of their immediate concern, within their neighborhood, their city and their country, than the news of their ‘home’ called EU. In the present dissertation, we try to shed some light on EU’s newsworthiness, focusing on the Greek case, though most of the general, theoretical assumptions that emerge from the literature are almost perfectly applicable in all EU member states and in all respective – 27 national - ‘public opinions’. Referring briefly to several important topics of journalistic research, mass and political communication and sociology, e.g., public sphere, agenda setting, and modern grass-roots reactions against politics, we get an obviously negative answer regarding the question of worthiness of EU news. Even media that do not have “what the audience likes” as the core of their journalistic function, acquiesce in the version that EU isn’t so catchy in its citizens’ eyes. Greeks might want to know more about the EU, according to our paper questionnaire answers, but ten media professionals argue why it is difficult for an average citizen to get more interested in the EU and finally to fall in love with it… Journalism could contribute to better knowing and understanding of the EU by its citizens and this is an issue at stake for our research. Key words: EU news, newsworthiness, agenda setting, public sphere

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract………………………………………………………………………………… 1

Table of contents……………………………………………………………………... 2

1. INTRODUCTION...... 3 Objectives and research questions...... 5 Structure of the Dissertation……………………………………………………………... … 6

2. CHAPTER: What’s the matter? 2.1 Terms in relation with public interest …………………………………….. 8 2.2 Eurobarometer polls for …………………………………………… 9 2.3 What people want from journalism………………………………...... 12

3. CHAPTER: The “failures of journalism vis-à-vis ” 3.1 The media coverage of the EU Institutions (Failures of representation)….. 15 3.1.1 Press corps of Brussels...……………………………………….... 17 3.1.2 The nationalization of ‘European journalism’…………………… 19 3.2 The agenda setting issue (Failures of production)………………………… 20 3.2.1 The agenda setting process………………………………………. 21 3.2.2 The ‘second-level agenda-setting’ function..……………………. 24 3.3 Some reasons for low visibility (Failures of participation)……………….. 26 3.3.1 The Public Sphere issue...………………………………………… 27 3.3.2 Definitions and basic concepts about EPS...…………………….. 28 3.3.3The “could be” European Public Sphere…………………………. 31 3.3.4 The digital transformations of Public Sphere…………...... 34

4. CHAPTER: The research 4.1 Interviews with journalists…………………………………………………. 37 4.1.1 Findings………………………………………………………….. 38 4.2 Survey……………………………………………………………………… 45 4.2.1 Findings of the poll………………………………………………. 47

5. CONCLUSIONS...... 54

References…………………………………………………………………………….. 59

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1. Introduction

In a turbulent period for humanity, such as the one we are experiencing, belonging to a supranational organization, with the economic and many – theoretically - political possibilities provided by the EU, is like to be blessed by God... This is especially true for small countries with problems of corruption, deficient organization and democratic functioning, and with lack of a competitive and self-sufficient productive base. The value of this belongingness to the EU, however, does not seem to be appreciated much by its member states, nor by the larger ones - which is why Britain became the first country to leave the joint operation - but unfortunately neither by the smaller member states. European integration is a goal that must be approached from many different angles, either in terms of technical issues (e.g., pan-European political parties) or in terms of further economic and political homogeneity (debt mutualization, common foreign policy, etc.)1 or finally, in terms of better PR and communication. The last strand of issues is the one that this dissertation is basically concerned with, not in an attempt to answer to the so-called ‘democratic deficit problem’ of the EU but in a negotiation of the media’s position within the EU, which is crucial for the EU’s future (Frangonikopoulos 2017). The mass media, as it will become evident, do not appear to be taking the EU as an actor and as a political entity that plays a key role with its decisions in the lives of European citizens. On the contrary the EU is lagging behind the importance of the national governments and it is the media that sustains for the EU a series of myths and stereotypes, “Euromyth stories”, according to Meyer (1999:629) to make it remain icy, abstract and distant for the majority of European citizens, as the Eurobarometer polls prove every year (Oberhuber et al. 2005:258, Trenz 2008:295, Kaldor & Selchow 2013, Frangonikolopoulos and Poulakidakos 2017). The EU consequently does not evoke much interest on the part of most of the European public; it isn’t ‘catchy’, according to marketing terminology. We should also define the ‘political information environment’ in which we are going to move (Van Aelst et al. 2017:4) and the subject of this dissertation as the continuous process of supply and demand of political news and political information within a certain society, which is the 27 member-states of the EU. Nothing but politics in the EU concerns us in this research.

1 J.C. Juncker’s five scenarios for how the Union could evolve is such an agony, such as E. Macron’s Initiative for Europe 2016 and the so- called EU Global Strategy by F. Mogherini (Juncker 2017, Macron 2017, Mogherini 2016). 3

Our whole discussion takes place on a theoretical background that is applicable to all EU countries. However we keep always Greece in mind and although it is difficult to separate the part from the whole, i.e., one member state out of the 27, we try to adapt the theoretical ‘arsenal’ to the Greek case; with regard to the Research Questions (RQ) that will be put to the public and to ten professional editors and journalists of some major Greek media in the last chapter, we formulate the following two hypotheses (H) that are based on the considerations of our dissertation’s main topics mentioned above. Our first Hypothesis is actually the assumption that the isn’t catchy. EU doesn’t possess the qualities of visibility and newsworthiness; thus, the extent to which the EU is featured in the news can rarely affect public opinion formation and act as the most important player in the political ‘ground’ of any country and in the present case, in Greece (Schuck et al. 2016:3). H1: The public in Greece doesn’t like the European Union, because EU isn’t glamorous and attractive to its citizens.

Regardless of the acceptance of the EU among each country’s citizens on the scale of Europhile vs Eurosceptic - which is a key issue far beyond our interest - it seems unlikely that this pressing question and ‘chicken and egg’ deadlock can be answered: is the media coverage itself or the indifference of citizens for what is happening in the decision-making centers of Europe, more responsible for the reduced journalistic interest in the EU? – a dispassion that essentially shapes the agenda of the media, in the end. We adopt Trenz’s (2008:297-8) perspective who says that: …media cannot be expected to enhance democracy of a constitutionalized EU but rather to put systemic constraints on the widening and deepening of integration beyond the national. The empirical focus will be on the performance of political news journalism, which takes the leading part in this normative construction of the EU reality.

Noteworthy, however, is the negative aspect that is usually rendered to citizens by actors such as politicians and journalists in order to justify people’s loathing of the EU. What you do not know well, you cannot love it. You can at best, fall in love with it for a while. So, it is easy, inevitably, for the other part to put the blame on the EU’s citizens, as the main factor of EU’s low impact on people’s lives and consequently, the public is charged that it doesn’t want to know more about the EU. The citizens’ alleged low interest in the EU and the weak demand for news adjusts the final supply of news by the Greek media, in our case: H2: Greek citizens are not interested in the EU and the media adapt to their choice. 4

Objectives and research questions Both parts Greek citizens and Greek media express their opinions on these hypotheses; with two specific methodological tools, we attempt to respond to the main issue, EU’s newsworthiness, by recording the views of citizens and some Greek media representatives. The public and the press confront slightly different issues; these Research Questions arise from the fundamental debate about EU’s newsworthiness and they are addressed respectively to ten professionals of Greek print and electronic media and to Greek citizens via an opinion poll conducted with a questionnaire posted on Facebook and on two other websites. The Research Questions, which were adapted to the needs of an interview and a questionnaire for an opinion poll (Chapter 4), are: RQ: Do all EU news have value for you or only those issues that concern Greece? RQ: Does the EU news that doesn’t concern Greece take the position of national or international news in your agenda? RQ: Do your readers/viewers show real interest in EU news and if they don’t what’s the reason? RQ: How well do you know the European Union and its institutions? RQ: How much are you interested in the EU news? RQ: How much do the media that you prefer for your information, present news about the EU? By the time we’ll come to journalists’ and citizens’ answers, all the aforementioned Research Questions will also be discussed through the lens of an extensive scientific literature. From the structural features of mass media and the difficulties of covering a supranational organization that deals not only with security or economic development but with many aspects of the European citizens’ daily life, so that it almost replaces national governments’ decisive role in many cases, to the absence of the so-called Public Sphere, a concept that characterizes every small or large social group with at least one citizen and one ruler, we try to handle the key question “why Europe is not so ‘catchy’ as a news item?”… rnebring (2009b:5) classified the perceived failures of journalism vis-à-vis Europe as failures of representation, failures of production and failures of participation and we follow this categorization. After a reference to statistics and to the changes in the Greeks’ attitude towards the EU and towards the press in Greece (from the Eurobarometer polls and “Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism”), we investigate how Greek journalism concerning the EU is conducted: are the so-called journalistic cultures visible in the different ways that EU is

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covered in France, Germany and Greece? Is there a European Public Sphere above the national public sphere of Greece and the regional public sphere say, of Epirus? How does the agenda setting process in a Greek medium place the international issues and the EU news? How does a Greek medium frame the EU news and the European Union as an idea and as a political concept? The topic of EU’s newsworthiness, as we examine it, has not occupied the scientific community and all stakeholders involved in each field of the EU, as much as it should have. Each time we will go from the general to specific that will be Greece, and vice versa. With examples from the very recent political history of Greece, we will try to substantiate our claims based on bibliographic references.

Structure of the Dissertation The dissertation is structured in five main sections: the first section (Chapter 2) reviews with numbers and statistics the level of consensus that the EU enjoys among Greece’s populace. In addition, political and information patterns of the majority of Greeks affect the quality of knowledge that the Greeks acquire, especially nowadays, in the digital era. The problem is therefore not only of quantity but also of quality. In the same vein, we are going to argue that a major shortcoming of the political communication and EU’s journalistic coverage in Greece is the lack of research, as is the case with other countries, on what the Greeks asks from journalism and what journalism offers to the public, respectively. A comparison of the data misses because the expectations of the Greeks from the journalistic work for specific searches was never measured; on the contrary, we know which missions Greek journalists consider as the most important hierarchically for their work (Newman et al. 2019). The second section (Chapter 3.1) addresses the Greek journalism from the perspective of how a different journalistic culture can be discerned working within EU’s borders, when finally a peculiar journalistic ‘nationalism’ prevails in almost every member state of the EU, but exaggerated in countries like Greece. The processing of the EU news through the Greek filter denudes European politics of its content. The third section (Chapter 3.2) raises and addresses two important subjects for the journalistic activity: the agenda setting process and the ‘second-level agenda-setting’ function. The fourth section (Chapter 3.3) proposes a short discussion of the so called public ‘sphereness’, with the conclusion that a European Public Sphere can exist through the national public spheres whenever ‘crises’ and conflicts concern the EU, although that system 6

didn’t work successfully for many times till today, because new mass media and social media turned the ‘information society’ upside down (the media landscape has moved from a traditional press-broadcasting approach to more personalized and on-demand ‘solutions’, as say Papathanassopoulos et al. 2013:690). The final section before our conclusions consists of a) interviews with Greek journalists and editors in chief and b) an opinion, internet poll. Eight media representatives answer to the question if the EU is not ‘catchy’ and most of them take it for granted. The common denominator in their answers is that the EU is so ‘unnewsworthy’ that normally EU news does not receive the special attention of the Greek mass media and respectively, the Greek citizens aren’t attracted by the news flow about the EU. Yet the opposite is being claimed by the respondents to our questionnaire, so that in our conclusions, we must suggest ways for journalism to find a way out of this impasse and to serve its supreme political and educational purposes.

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2. What’s the matter?

2.1 Terms in relation with public interest The heart of our research is based on the paradox that whilst EU policies have a considerable effect on the lives of member states’ citizens, the policy-making process itself does not attract appropriate attention by EU’s populace (Frangonikolopoulos and Panagiotou 2019, Trimithiotis 2020:404). The EU is ‘real’ for European elites but it is more remote for European citizens (Risse 2010:10). EU politics is marginal in national news during routine periods, i.e., outside the referendum periods and when there are major scheduled events such as meetings, Eurogroup etc. (De Vreese et al. 2006:23). “The EU, then, is somewhat like the moon: though of major influence on the ebb and flow of Europe, it is only cyclically fully visible” said Jochen and De Vreese, explaining that there is generally little EU coverage which is more prominent during defined periods (2004:16). We must first of all, define the context of our key question and be quite clear about whether the small interest of the citizens in the EU is measurable or it is only ascertained by empirical findings. Many scholars have dealt with this issue, handling concepts with small differences among each other, such as visibility, media coverage and mediatization (Trenz 2008:304-5, Preston and Metykova 2009:42, Michailidou and Trenz 2010:4), “cynicism” (=absence of trust at the level of the institutions of government and the regime as a whole, or negativism and disapproval at the level of candidates and incumbent political leaders) (De Vreese and Semetko 2002:620), “synchronization” (Silke 2019:47) as well as “political parallelism” (Tresch 2009:73). Talking about political actors, we operationalise visibility as “the chance of reading about (an issue) in one ‘unit’ of reading time” (Gattermann and Vasilopoulou 2015:127), while Tresch (2009:74) distinguishes between “visibility” and “standing” in the media, where “standing” means “having a voice in the media” and visibility, in contrast, is a more general concept and includes media appearances as a mere object being discussed by others – both can be conceived of as simple media presence or, alternatively, as media prominence. It should be noted in passing, that does not mean a priori inadequate interest of these citizens in Europe and vice versa. It has been proved instead, that higher education that may lead to greater awareness of the shortcomings of the European

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institutions, make citizens more hesitant, or even unwilling, to trust those. More trust instead in domestic institutions fosters trust in the institutions of the European Union (Arnold et al 2012:29-33, Frangonikolopoulos and Papapadopoulou 2020:5).

2.2 Eurobarometer polls for Greece Low trust in European institutions according with little awareness about the EU’s functioning, as they are recorded during the last years in Greece by Standard Eurobarometer polls2, create very favorable conditions for Greeks’ very low interest in the EU matters. Taking as a measure of comparison a milestone year for Greece, 2004, a year of great national optimism due to the successful organization of the Olympic Games, the change of the political situation, winning the European Championship by the Greek national football team etc., we may see a rapid deterioration in Greeks’ feelings about the EU since then, which is obviously interpreted by the ten-year economic crisis. It is no coincidence that the four countries that suffered the most from the economic crisis of 2008, namely Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, are the ones with particularly low levels of trust towards the European institutions (Roth et al. 2014: 312, Frangonikolopoulos & Papapadopoulou 2020:7). During autumn 2004, the EU conjures up a positive image for the majority of the Greek public opinion compared to the EU average (very positive image, EL: 15% - EU25: 10% and fairly positive image, EL: 43% - EU25: 40%) (Eurobarometer 2004). Moreover, at least 6 out of 10 Greek respondents (63%) underlined that they have trust in the EU. In line with previous Eurobarometer surveys, television continues to be the most used (76%) and preferred (65%) source of information for Greeks when they are asked about sources of information on the EU. Only 11% of Greek citizens use the Internet as the main source to get information on issues related to the EU. The majority of the Greek poll (EL: 47% - EU25: 44%) sees the Greek media as objective in how they present the EU, 54% of the Greek sample feel that there is limited media coverage on EU issues, while 29% of them find Greek media coverage on the EU to be adequate. Finally, the degree of knowledge that Greeks display regarding the EU may be characterized as “good and improved” (ibid.). Fifteen years later, Greeks’ perceptions appear to be completely different. Though Greeks discuss about the EU with friends and relatives (frequently EL:23% - EU28:15% and occasionally EL:51% - EU28:50%), they trust EU less than the other Europeans do (EL:34%

2 The Standard Eurobarometer was established in 1974. See at https://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm 9

- EU28:43%), moreover they trust even less their national government (EL:26% - EU28:34%), parliament (EL:23% - EU28:34%) and political parties (EL:7% - EU28:19%). Greeks’ awareness about the European institutions, like the , the Commission, the and the European Council, is higher than the EU28 average, and on the contrary, Greeks declare that they don’t know well how the EU works (EL:59% - EU28:59% - Sweden:82% - Italy: 44% - 20 member states are above the EU average) (Eurobarometer 2019a). As far as the media are concerned, Greeks watch TV a lot (every day/almost every day EL:85% - EU28:77%), but in between 2004 and 2019, there is a huge increase in the percentage of those who prefer to be informed by the internet (EL:62% - EU28:69%) and especially social networks (EL:53% - EU28:48%). Popular faith in the media is waning (tent to trust EL:22% - EU28:38% and tend not to trust EL:77% - EU28:58%), with television showing the greatest problem of mistrust (tent to trust EL:22% - EU28:49% and tend not to trust EL:78% - EU28:47%). On the contrary, Greeks trust the internet (tent to trust EL:42% - EU28:32% and tend not to trust EL:44% - EU28:55%) but not the online social networks so much (tent to trust EL:27% - EU28:20% and tend not to trust EL:59% - EU28:65%) (Eurobarometer 2019b, Eurobarometer 2019c). Information and communication via the Internet arouse citizens’ suspicion and distrust in media, politics and government, as we are going to support. The feeling that national televisions talks “about the right amount” about the EU is predominant in 28 EU Member States, but Greece is below the EU average (EL:41% - EU28:50%, “talk too little”: EL:27% - EU28:24%). Concerning objectivity, Greeks believe that television is not so high (it presents the EU too positively EL:46% - EU28:18% / objectively EL:30% - EU28:51% / too negatively EL:17% - EU28:14%) (Eurobarometer 2019b).

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In the same vein, “Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism 2020” provides the most recent statistical data about how news is being consumed in a range of countries, with the results of a research that was conducted at the end of January/beginning of February 2020 (Newman et al. 2020). According to that research, “the media market in Greece is characterised by online fragmentation, a changing and polarised TV market, a print sector in crisis and one of the highest uses of social media for news”, with smartphones being used by the Greeks now to access news more often than computers, for the first time (Figure 1). The media remain widely distrusted by Greeks, with few outlets seen as independent from political or business interests and less than a third trust the news, which is amongst the lowest percentages in the whole survey. Many of the popular sources such as ‘Newsbomb’ and ‘SKAI News’ are the least trusted media in Greece (Figure 2) (ibid:73). “Decades of corruption, political and business undue influences, and their targeting by left- and right-wing populist parties have resulted in the media being widely distrusted by Greeks” says “Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019” and the discrediting of the media is getting bigger because of the political parties’ attitude which exacerbates even more the already polarised political climate in Greece. The intense polarization is reflected in the news media landscape this year, with ‘New Democracy’ banning its MPs from being interviewed by the public service broadcaster, citing unfair coverage and pro-government bias on the one hand and ‘SYRIZA’ on the other, boycotting the largest news broadcaster ‘SKAI’, following their dissatisfaction with SKAI’s wildfire coverage in Attica (Newman et al. 2019:88-89).

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What is worse so far, ‘SYRIZA’ party members invoke the polls’ measurements that show the aforementioned high rates of public disapproval against the legacy media, in order to strengthen their supposedly anti-systemic rhetoric, as ‘victims’ of an unfair criticism against them by the systemic media. This, however, further discredits the traditional media, which should be the main pillar of mass communication in every country.

2.3 What do people want from journalism? As we will discuss later, the Greek journalists, without having any measurable data in their hands, claim that the audience does not want to hear and read news about the EU. However, they reach this rather arbitrary conclusion, while their media do not have any recent public opinion polls on topics preferred by their audiences. Finally, what we are witnessing is a vicious circle that reminds us the old Greek tale of the fox and the sour grapes… (Sunstein 2001:111). Journalism’s role in society (two of the most recent reviews of literature about journalistic roles are Hanitzsch and Vos 2018 and Riedl & Eberl 2020) and knowing audience’s news interest are two interrelated subjects that must be taken into account in our deliberation. According to Tai and Chang (2002:256), as far as the news is concerned, a general hypothesis is that journalists and audiences do not perceive the world the same way and this hypothesis has stronger value especially for the global news, although the agenda is set by what the audiences ‘want to know’ plus what editors think their audiences ‘need to know’ (ibid. 253-4). The two scholars mention one typical example with Larry King: when a viewer of “Larry King Live” show complaint on the media obsession with the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, the American spokesman argued that “[we are only doing this because] this is what you want. Otherwise, why are you watching this program right now?”. Whether a reasonable balance between the two is achieved or not in mass media, is a topic of scientific research for many years now and the answer depends on the audience and on the subject too (Bennett 1990:106, Tai and Chang 2002:252, McQuail 2010:262, Van Aelst et al. 2017). For EU news, Representative Liberal theory would be ideal as a model of Public Sphere in order the EU to become part of citizens’ reality (“the media are doing their job, citizens will be encouraged to vote, and the media will provide enough information about the parties and candidates so that citizens can choose intelligently among them”, Ferree et al. 2002: 291) but this doesn’t happen. For Greece in particular, the professional role

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orientations (Riedl & Eberl 2020:4), that Greek journalists find as most important for their work, are ‘to report things as they are’, ‘to let people express their views’, ‘to provide analysis of current affairs’, etc. (Figure 3) (Dimitrakopoulou 2017:1), which are all far beyond from the features of EU institutions that have to be explained to the public, to be monitored and scrutinized more thoroughly by the several actors (politicians, journalists etc.).

Journalists and editors in chief we interviewed admit that there are no recent measurements of their audiences’ preferences for news content. They tend to believe nevertheless, that news content about the EU isn’t so attractive to their audiences. What is lacking is audiences’ opinion about ‘good journalism’ in Greece; measurements and researches with this specific object as there exist for example, for the Israeli public (Tsfati et al. 2006), for the American public (De Zúñiga and Hinsley 2013, Willnat et al. 2019) and for the German public (Loosen et al. 2020), based on the same methodology: classic items and data from bases such as “Worlds of Journalism” or the “Reuters Institute’s Digital News Surveys” are related and compared with the population’s point of view about what is ‘good journalism’ in each country (Loosen et al. 2020:1747) and what kind of journalism the public prefer. These four researches shed some light over what may constitute ‘good journalism’ for the public and for journalists. These findings show that journalists and citizens have somewhat divergent views on the proper roles for the news media: While a majority of journalists believe that investigating government claims and discussing national and international political affairs are important functions of the press, citizens seem to regard getting news quickly, avoiding unverified

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stories, and concentrating on the widest audience possible as more important (Willnat et al. 2019:430).

A possible discrepancy in the answers of a future research on the Greek press, may help explain growing public dissatisfaction with the media and the mistrust towards journalists that is expressed in the aforementioned public opinion surveys (Tsfati et al. 2006:154); when audiences do not have a high regard for news organizations, they are less likely to trust those organizations and are more likely to turn away from news information from legacy media, say De Zúñiga and Hinsley (2013:937), which has an impact on democracy’s health. Finally, as Van Aelst et al. (2017:8) put it, “the demand for political news both on the aggregate level and among those more and less politically interested users, is one of the most burning questions for future political communication research”, in the supply and demand scale of ‘consuming’ political information. Finally, departing from the hard core of EU integration issue, the shift of human life’s center of gravity from the political process to everyday life is one of the most significant transformations of our time, which can also significantly change journalism’s priorities, pointing to nonpolitical utility of news and to three interrelated spaces of everyday needs: consumption, identity, and emotion (Hanitzsch and Vos 2018:157, Standaert et al. 2019). Figure 4 illustrates the relationship between these three areas and the journalistic roles that correspond with them.

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3. The “failures of journalism vis-à-vis Europe”

Several factors corroborate the public’s predisposition towards the EU as seen in the Eurobarometer findings, such as the basic parameters of the journalistic function, as well as the way the mass media operate within the EU, and finally the “sphereness” subject, issues that will all be analyzed below. Using rnebring’s categorization (2009b:5), this chapter examines in detail the three “failures of journalism vis-à-vis Europe” (failures of representation, production and participation), before coming to the Greek case, applying the findings of our research to the theoretical admissions. rnebring defines the three categories as follows: 1. Failures of representation: media coverage of Europe fails to be comprehensive, informative and interesting. 2. Failures of production: media production is organised in such a way that creates institutional as well as individual incentives either not to report European issues at all, or to report them in a simplified, sensationalist and overly negative manner. 3. Failures of participation: the end result of these failures of representation and production is that European citizens do not engage with European issues and European politics.

3.1 The media coverage of the EU Institutions: the failures of representation Hallin and Mancini’s three models intersect journalism on the European continent horizontally and transversely and a European journalism cannot thus be defined, much less an EU journalism can do, because media systems co-evolve in symbiosis with the political system and within a particular political culture (Hallin & Mancini 2004, 2012, 2017). The three approaches to interactions between news media and government institutions co-exist within the same territory: (a) the Liberal Model, which prevails in Anglo-Saxon cultures like those of Great Britain and Ireland – beyond the United States, (b) a Democratic Corporatist Model that is customary across the Northern regions of the European continent and (c) a Polarized Pluralist Model favored by the Mediterranean countries of . Hallin and Mancini’s classification of systems rests on four key dimensions: (1) the development of media markets, with particular emphasis on the strong or weak development of a mass circulation press; (2) political parallelism; that is, the degree and nature of the links between the media and political parties or, more broadly, the extent to 15

which the media system reflects the major political divisions in society; (3) the development of journalistic professionalism; and (4) the degree and nature of state intervention in the media system (Hallin & Mancini 2004:21). Briefly, the defining characteristics of the ‘Liberal Model’ are a vibrant commercial news market, a limited amount of state intervention, a high degree of journalistic professionalism, and a weak political parallelism, with the purest example being the U.S. media system. The ‘Polarized Pluralist Model’ is found in the Mediterranean countries; here the mass-circulation newspaper does not have a firm footing, the state is interventionist, political parallelism is high, and journalistic professionalism is not deeply rooted. Journalists in these countries are more ‘dependent’ on political elites than are those working within the Liberal Model. The ‘Democratic Corporatist Model’ describes the media systems of northern and central European democracies; here historical, cultural, political, and market forces have combined to produce a variation marked by the coexistence of strong commercial media and politically linked media and by a relatively benign form of state intervention that allows a high degree of journalistic professionalism to develop. The question is therefore asked whether a type of journalism with common characteristics can be practiced in the EU, a kind of ‘eurojournalism’ (Baisnée 2002:116) and especially, if a sufficient part of the public demands a style of EU-orientated coverage that national media are unable to provide, with a different institutional focus and agenda from that of the individual member states (Schlesinger 1999:276, Firmstone 2008:436). However, this has been the case due to the concerns of an elite to create transnational newspapers, focused geographically in Brussels, in order to pursue EU news, from the economic perspective only (Wall Street Journal Europe, the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times Europe and the European Voice), perhaps because as Kevin (1997:174) says, business, economics and the single currency are the most Europeanized areas of reporting and additionally, because economics transcends borders more easily than politics – “news from nowhere” (Lloyd & Marconi 2014:5). Attempts have been made respectively by the in developing pan- European channels, unfortunately without great success. The first two, the Eurikon experiment (1982) and the Europa TV (1985), collapsed within a year of their launch as neither viewers nor advertisers were attracted by the channels. Two later attempts, Eurosport (1989) and Euronews (1993), have proven more successful, but both channels play only peripheral roles in terms of audience ratings and are only accessible via satellite and/or cable television (Semetko et al. 2000:126). In contrast to the aforementioned TV channels, MTV follows the same policy of regionalization, employing the ‘local’ language but not changing the main product which is music, significantly, but in the end, MTV has achieved a completely different impact on the countries where its program is broadcasted (McQuail 16

2010:225). This obviously means that in the first case the ‘product’ is not… likeable and finally that the assumption that so long as a broadcast network exists with a focus on pan- European reporting then the people of member states would become more European, was too naïve (Williams & Toula 2017:1578). Examining the diversity of the journalistic outlet from a more commercial aspect, differences in the quality and style of news reporting are produced by a) the type of media (print vs television), b) the financing structure of the broadcasting outlet (public vs private) and c) the nature of the newspaper (tabloid vs broadsheet). Newspapers generally have more political news than television does, given that they have far less constraints in terms of space and production costs. Public broadcasters tend to have more political and economic news and in particular more news about Europe than do private news companies etc.… (De Vreese 2006:26). According to rnebring (2009a:13), a dominant model of journalism driven primarily by commercial concerns does exist and is becoming more and more important everywhere but that does not mean the end of the “national filter”. Concluding, the prognosis for the emergence of a ‘European journalism’ or pan‐European journalistic culture is poor (ibid:10). Unfortunately, today’s media want to get everywhere- instead of getting into the European heaven, says Russ: “This is probably the main economic reason why waiting for a European journalism may be like waiting for Godot” (2003:214). While there is no pan‐European journalism aimed at a wider audience, there is finally, an emergent European elite journalism aimed at an elite audience and that takes precedence overall, in the end. So, Downey et al. (2012) conclude that even within national boundaries, different class-based public spheres are more probable to be formed as actually existing public spheres, based on profound class cleavages, than a single national public sphere. In addition, individuals holding capital assets had always been of greater interest to European integration because it was through integration which the maximization of their profits passed and they have greater incentives to monitor developments at the European level. Therefore this was another reason why integration was considered as a goal of the elites (Clark 2014). Things will be even more difficult for a supranational organization as the EU. Thus, there is a lack of a European journalistic conscience that will put the EU first in the daily lives of its citizens. A European model of journalism, as a more theoretical than empirical target, is an allowable generalization but with contradictory empirical support, says Mancini (2005), because even within the same country there can be no a single journalistic model.

3.1.1 Press corps of Brussels The EU press corps is considered to be one of the largest in the world and it tends to outgrow the number of correspondents accredited in other European capitals and even in Washington, D.C. (Russ 2003:208). Hundreds of accredited, permanent journalists and 17

freelancers cover the EU institutions. To the Commission ‘Journalists’ means written, radio and TV journalists, film crews and press photographers (2016). ‘Accredited journalist’ means any journalist in possession of a valid media accreditation issued by the Commission or the Parliament3 and being valid for the Commission, Council and Parliament. ‘Press zones’ are the dedicated zones for press activities on Commission premises, mainly in the Berlaymont and the Charlemagne buildings and for the European Parliament respectively, journalists move between Brussels and Strasburg. The way that EU is reported changed radically at least four times through the last decades. We could say that Europe had three “heydays”, after the time between 1976 and 1987, when the number of correspondents in Brussels almost doubled: the first one was the signing of the in 1992, the second was the eastward expansion after the end of communism in Central and (2004) and the third was the debt crisis that began in 2009–10 (Raeymaeckers et al. 2007:103, Lloyd & Marconi 2014:20). The tornado triggered by the debt crisis is reflected in the evolution of journalism itself: in 2003 there were only two freelancers; in 2013 there became 54, as a cheaper solution for the media (Lloyd & Marconi 2014:21). According to Harding, the number of accredited journalists in Brussels has grown almost continuously – from 259 in 1976, to 480 in 1987, to 783 in 1995 and 929 in 2004. In the last decade, numbers have been more or less stable. In May 2012, the date the last directory of journalists was published, there were 931 reporters. This rose to 1.022 in September 2013 and fell to 934 in October 2014 and 955 one year later (Harding 2016). We found a recent report (April 2019) on the number of 770 accredited journalists to the EU institutions by James Canter4 but there is not an open and transparent official list of the European Parliament’s accredited journalists5. The coverage of the EU is not an easy job for journalists. Covering issues like the debt crisis for the Greek mass media could be sufficient if it was done close to the decision- making centers, though correspondents’ autonomy has been significantly shortened, especially for those who work for TV networks. “The previous EU ‘meetings tourism’ – flying to a city with other journalists, going from the hotel to a remote conference centre

3 There are three types of accreditation: the permanent accreditation to all institutions, accreditation to one institution only and a temporary pass for reporters who only visit the EU institutions occasionally (Raeymaeckers et al. 2007:103). 4 The Atlantic “The European Press Corps Cannot Cover the EU” at https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/european- press-corps-eu-fails/587083/ 5 Read “Why don’t we all know which journalists are accredited to the EU institutions?” at https://jonworth.eu/why-dont-we-all-know- which-journalists-are-accredited-to-the-eu-institutions/ 18

without talking to people – was then replaced by an attempt to understand how other member states worked” write Papathanassopoulos & Giannouli (2014:1). Lloyd & Marconi (2014:53) argue that Greece should have got the most informed and active news media in order to assist its 11 million people to understand something of what was happening to them during the 2010’s but it didn’t. Compared to 1999, Greece’s correspondents in EU in 2014 were slightly more: only 15, or else 1.6% of total press corps – Germany has got 131 (14.1%) and Malta 1 (Raeymaeckers et al. 2007:103). In September 2020, the spokesperson’s service of the European Commission (SPP)6 responding to our question, informed us that there are 12 permanently accredited journalists working for Greek media. In addition, it is worth mentioning that 10 are journalists and 2 are photographers. With ready-made reports from foreign news agencies, translation of press releases and the reports of foreign journalists, the Greek media could not formulate a specific, common stand for interpreting the debt crisis, as they did not give way to the difficult functioning of the EU that could only be described by qualified journalists being at the heart of the action. Consequently, much of the narrative was centered on a model which compared country A with country B (Lloyd & Marconi 2014:67), as for example the battle between the German and the Greek press: Greeks were advised to sell the Parthenon to pay for their debts and Germans were characterized as Nazis. As a result, it is most probable that most of the Greeks learned nothing from their ten years adversities.

3.1.2 The nationalization of ‘European journalism’ Journalism practiced in Brussels suffers from a disease, because it does not present things as they are recorded, but as they are seen through the lens of the local and national interests of the citizen to whom news is addressed (Baisnée 2002:116). A national frame (national concerns) determine the way in which Europe is reported and European journalists are actually ‘localists’ in that they have to write for a local audience ( rnebring 2009a:8). Political leaders and journalists camouflage European Union, in terms of ‘national interest’ or ‘cost and benefit’ measurement (Kevin 1997:88). Nation-states constitute the main reference to how functions of journalism are being defined. Distributed contents, agendas and routine practices of journalism are being deeply synchronized with apparatuses and identities of nation states (Heikkilä & Kunelious 2008:378), a continual ‘flagging’ or reminding of nationhood (Rantanen 2009:92), something

6 SPP operates under the political authority of the President of the Commission and in cooperation with national representations of the European Commission –https://ec.europa.eu/info/contact/press-services/press-contacts/press-contacts-spokespersons-service_en 19

which is also explained by the fact that national and regional networks of communication mediate and disseminate the EU’s political communication (Schlesinger 1999:270,276, Trimithiotis 2020:414). Papathanassopoulos and Giannouli call the process ‘domestication’ (2014:4-5). Correspondents on EU’s capitals understand and interpret EU affairs “through their national eyes”, neglecting the “global village”, in which we all Europeans live, and a paradox has been developing: on the one hand, efforts were made to make international news a window on the world; on the other hand, efforts were made to ‘domesticate’ international information for national audiences. Similarly, Frangonikolopoulos (2016) asks the Greek mass media to “be unhooked” by the phenomenon of ‘domestication’ – or ‘localizing the global’, i.e. “the adaptation of international news to the national anxieties” (he wonders for example, when the radioactive cloud of Fukushima is expected to reach Greece?). Greek correspondents in the EU express the opinion that the ‘hellenification’ of the European news has a direct impact on the Greek public’s level of knowledge and understanding, and they underline the feeling that “when an EU story is not “hellenified”, i.e., when the reporter does not give the topic a “Greek-centered” dimension, the (Greek) public will never be interested in the news” (Frangonikolopoulos & Papadopoulou 2020:10-12). In the aftermath, whether these are the orders of their editors in chief or they do it by choice, national correspondents and European journalists in general, appear to be responsible for restricting the quality and the quantity of information that the public has access to about Europe (Firmstone 2008:434) and they take the rap for European Public Sphere showing so few signs of life.

3.2 The agenda setting issue: failures of production In an alleged European Public Sphere, the mass media fulfill crucial functions as (1) agenda setting and second level agenda-setting (or framing); and (2) opinion formation which refers to presenting actors’ own positions and evaluations (Pfetsch 2004:6-7). News, as Wall (2005:155) defines it, all too suitably for our case, is not the ‘mirror’ of reality but “a manufactured cultural product”, which reproduces the political powers existent in the society. Political journalism in the EU has an additional load in selecting and interpreting the kind of information that forms the basis of citizens’ and voters’ knowledge of the EU. European mass media are called to use as amplifiers of political information about the EU and to select

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outputs and to turn them into news that shape the political reality of Europe (Trenz 2008:303). “Failures of presentation” and “failures of production” are closely intertwined and as far as the latter are concerned, we are focusing on the procedures called ‘agenda setting’ and ‘framing’.

3.2.1 The agenda setting process Agenda setting on EU affairs follows the general principles of this journalistic rationality, as an interactional process. As Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur (1976:12) describe: Topics are filtered through media information-gathering and –processing systems and then selectively disseminated. The public sorts out their interest and concern with this information as a function of both their individual differences in personal make-up and their location in societal strata and categories. Out of this system of variables and factors emerges a list of topics to which varying numbers of people give differential assignments of importance. That list constitutes the agenda of the media audience as a whole.

Even if the mass media may have little or greater influence on the direction or intensity of attitudes on the formation of public opinion, it is hypothesized that the mass media set the agenda for each political campaign, influencing the salience of attitudes toward the political issues (McCombs & Shaw 1972:177, Noelle-Neumann 1974:44). Though in our digital era, with the rise of new media, the potential agenda-setting power of traditional media is called into question (McNair 2003:156-7, Sayre Ben et al. 2012:12) or on the other hand, the news agenda becomes increasingly dominated by ‘soft’ entertaining items (the intermixing of news and/or entertainment, i.e., the so-called ‘infotainment’ or ‘tabloidization’) (Bourdieu 1996:17-18, McNair 2003:159, Harcup & O’Neill 2017:1481). We could keep in mind nevertheless, as a basic idea of agenda-setting what was formulated in 1963 by Bernard Cohen: “The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about” (cited by Semetko et al. 2000:136 and Entman 2007:165). Talking about Greece, while media administrators and producers regarding EU seem to recognize the importance of delivering information about EU politics for citizens, they blame the audience for not sharing this view, and therefore they lead to a downgrade of EU affairs in the media agendas (Trimithiotis 2020:412). Greek EU correspondents in Frangonikolopoulos and Papadopoulou (2020:13) describe it as a “vicious cycle’: …the head editor does not believe that the public is in any way interested in international news and therefore he dedicates very little time to them, presenting 21

fragmentary and scarce information. It is then extremely hard for the public to have a broad, complete picture of the news. Consequently, it is normal for the public to actually lose its interest in international and European news and in this way reaffirms the editor’s assumptions.

Unavoidably, the audience value of news production leads to a reduction of personnel and time for the editing of such news is also low. EU issues are classified as a subcategory of international issues within the newsrooms (Trimithiotis 2020), although in theory, these issues could have the same weight of issues about government (Kevin 1997:175). A pan-European pattern of news coverage about EU affairs is high visibility during key events – or during “crises” as Krzyżanowski (2009) or Kaye (2009:54) put it - and low visibility in routine periods (Gleissner & De Vreese 2005:236). In particular, the coverage of EU affairs usually peaks around the summits of the EU heads of government, the plenaries of the EU Parliament and the meetings of the Commission and the Council (Machill et al. 2009:19, Trimithiotis 2020:411), plus Eurogroup meetings for the members of the . Exceptional cases are not even the elections for the European Parliament, at least for the majority of countries, and therefore, the term ‘second order elections’7 has been established for them, even though, EP election campaigns might have the potential to offer a trans- cultural and cross-national media event that breaks the normal routines of media broadcasting over the EU (Michailidou & Trenz 2010:6). The most important aspect of second-order elections is that there seems to be less at stake. Certain consequences result immediately from this, such as: lower level of participation, lack of interest, lack of knowledge and distrust of the European Union, lack of conflict with high intensity between the national political parties (De Vreese 2009:9,16), campaign exposure of low profile, brighter prospects for small and new political parties, etc. (Reif & Schmitt 1980:9). Who is to blame more is a big and complex question, parties and the media surely need to ask themselves how much they contribute to raise this salient procedure to the right level (Bicchi 2003:38). There are a few studies about the visibility of the European parliamentary elections that include Greece. These content analyses show that for at least two EP elections, of 1999 and 2004, there was more prominent coverage of the elections in Greece than in the most other countries (Jochen et al. 2004:423, Banducci & Semetko 2004, De Vreese et al. 2006:30-32).

7 The “first-order” elections in parliamentary systems are the national parliamentary elections, and in presidential systems, the national presidential elections. In addition to these, however, there is a plethora of “second-order” elections: by-elections, municipal elections, various sorts of regional elections, those to a “second chamber” and the like. See Reif & Schmitt 1980, De Vreese 2001, Bicchi et. al 2003, Jochen et al. 2004, Banducci & Semetko 2004, De Vreese et al. 2006, Michailidou & Trenz 2010, De Vreese 2009, Michailidou 2012. 22

Plus, according to Hobolt (2014:1534) during the 2014 European election campaigns, Greece recorded the second highest percentage of people who watched the televised debates between the five candidates for the European Commission Presidency. Greece has also high awareness of the so-called ‘Spitzenkandidaten’ – a German term meaning that the candidate whose European party group gained most votes should become the next Commission President (ibid. 1536). This does not mean that the EP elections in Greece receive the attention they deserve, but for the two specific years, 1999 and 2004, we must take into account that the EP elections were linked to the national electoral competitions and the great interest for the forthcoming victory of ‘Nea Dimokratia’, which was not achieved marginally in 1999 but took place in 2004 (this correlation is repeated in 2009 and 2019 elections too). Moreover, bibliographic and empirical data prove that the EP elections in Greece are held with the traditional terms of national elections, as a confrontation between the two largest parties. While the election campaign of 1999 was heavily reported in Greece, EU representatives – EU actors (EU officials, candidates etc.) hardly appeared on Greek television news instead of the non-EU representatives – national actors (Jochen et al. 2004:425) – the difference is more than twice! Gattermann and Vasilopoulou allege that visibility doesn’t depend on ‘what the MEPs do in the EP’ but on ‘who these MEPs are’ in terms of office, seniority and status (2015:134 and Tresch 2009:72). Surprisingly, Bicchi et al. (2003:27) come to a conclusion that while transnational manifestoes neither replaced nor profoundly modified national party manifestoes during EP elections in the majority of the EU countries, one of the two exceptions in this respect during the 1999 elections was the Greek ‘PASOK’, which used the European Socialist manifesto while nuancing its position in the campaign itself. However, even if this happened in 1999, the EP elections’ agenda in Greece is always dominated by the national issues. Controversies, for example on television debates, cannot take place concerning the relatively slight nuances between the larger European parties over EU’s important issues, otherwise the production would be ‘boring’. As the interest is aroused through a conflict, a substantial controversy could be over the value of Greece’s participation in the EU, but this rarely happens, because the importance of EU membership is questioned only by few parties such as the Communist Party (KKE) and forces of the extra-parliamentary Left (ANTARSYA, M-L KKE, etc.).

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3.2.2 The ‘second-level agenda-setting’ function We now examine the so-called ‘second-level agenda-setting’ function which refers to a process that scholars name also ‘framing’. The concept of framing refers to the contextualization of issues by the mass media, namely the construction of a framework of interpretative meaning around an issue, which then is taken as a basis for collective opinion formation (Pfetsch 2004:6-7, Van Gorp 2005:487). Framing refers to “the observation that media can portray one and the same topic in very different ways, emphasizing certain evaluations or only parts of an issue at the expense of others” (Entman 1991, Zaller & Chiu 1996, Schuck & De Vreese 2006:5). So far, the meanings of EU remain unclear and within each country a different EU seems to be represented and different issues are debated [Conrad (2014:99-104) provides a frame analysis presenting different frames about the history, the present and the future of European integration]. Through a limited repertoire for representing the European political space, a relatively common representation to most of the countries understands the EU as an arena of a power struggle between the member states (Oberhuber et al. 2005:263), which is not perceived like this by many Greeks (as we argue later and as it is declared in Graph 12 of our internet poll). “An open and ongoing process of human relationships, cultural and ideological differences at European level, which includes all the classic elements of national policy, such as conflict, consensus, corruption, injustice, bureaucracy and the emergence of political goals and agendas” (Frangonikolopoulos and Panagiotou 2019). That is a positive perspective for such a complex organization like EU and this is totally different from the negativism that is often cultivated by the mass media - to the point of absurdity and of conspiracy theorizing - concerning EU and EU politicians: as a bunch of “mad eurocrats” or as Machiavellians who are unconcerned with the public good (Trenz 2008:295-6, Lloyd & Marconi 2014:36). Frangonikolopoulos and Poulakidakos (2017) talk about the “regimes of truth” in the communication and reporting of the European Union, explaining the differences between post truth – propaganda – fake news and as they underline “the debate on the problems and future of the EU, both in the ‘anti-European’ and ‘pro-European’ camps, is characterized by the exclusive emphasis on ‘what might be true’…” (ibid: 62). A general principle is that mass media’s opinion about Europe resonates with the position of the national political elites and at the same time reinforces it (Pfetsch 2004:61). This is certainly the case for Greece as the ten years of the economic crisis indicates: during the decades of prosperity, from 1980 onwards, Euroscepticism in Greece was very low, political 24

elites were pro-European and the Greek people benefited from the country’s participation in the ECC. From 2010 onwards, however, the Greek austerity was attributed to the EU, the banking system etc., by part of the domestic political staff, and the urban myth that “foreigners want to destroy our country” began to circulate more and more, especially in the town squares during protests of the Greek “indignados” (Raudon & Shore 2018). From the first years of the crisis but also for a long time during which the Left party ‘SYRIZA’ held power in the country, the dominant political, framing preoccupation was asking the EU to be identified with “democracy” and “community of values” (Pfetsch 2004:29), and the EU was not considered to be a political-economic structure meaning obligations, benefits and rules for the participants. A sentence that Greeks heard uttered so often by the former Prime Minister Tsipras was: “we want Europe (meaning EU) but not this Europe. We want Europe of the many, Europe of the people…”8. However, is actually the idea of ‘ever closer union among the people of Europe’ in the Treaty of Rome so flexible, as many politicians have reasons to believe? (Kevin 1997). Above all, during 2012-2015, there was a fundamental mismatch between the framing of crisis in Greece held by policymakers and discussed in the mainstream media on the one hand, and the concerns of actors engaged in what Kaldor & Selchow (2013:78-79) call ‘subterranean politics’ on the other - phenomena that are not usually visible in mainstream debates but only with new democratic practices, in the town squares, on the Internet and elsewhere. On those occasions, Europe tended to be portrayed negatively; there were European flags with stars replaced by swastikas to be seen in Syntagma Square, Chancellor Merkel with Hitler’s moustache etc. As the strongest voices against Europe were growing, the composed and objective way in which the mass media tried to spread information from Brussels and other decision-making centers about Greece’s future, was not even heard or rather flouted as venal (diaploki). SYRIZA’s election program, if implemented, was certain to lead the country out of the . However, this admission, which was correctly expressed about ‘SYRIZA’ by the systemic media, was not believed by the many people, who attributed it to the inter-related interests (diaplekomena symferonta) (Dendrinou & Varvitsioti 2019:72, 286). Regardless of the examples of bad journalistic practice that undoubtedly existed during these years, the majority of press tried to describe the truth to the Greek people (Schimmelfennig 2019:1069), without them hearing it, and in the case of the Greek bailout referendum (2015), the real

8 Speech of Al. Tsipras in a pre-election event entitled “We fight for people’s Europe. For Europe of many” at https://government.gov.gr/agonizomaste-gia-tin-evropi-ton-laon-gia-tin-evropi-ton-pollon/ 25

limits of mass media’s power in influencing public opinion came to light, being real weak (an accurate description of the case of the Greek referendum is presented by Mendez and Mendez, 2017:124). National leaders, on the other hand, followed a narrative that says that when public opinion turns more sceptical about European integration, you have to undermine it (Rauh et al. 2019). During the Greek debt crisis, the media and political forces fed each other with negative news about the EU, resulting in growing distrust of the EU and Eurosceptic and populist views in Greece. This general distrust promoted by negativity – framing in terms of strategy and political problems, feeds challenges to the EU’s legitimacy, according to Galpin and Trenz (2017). The role of the internet and the so-called blogosphere in the years of the Greek crisis was important because, indeed, it may have shed light on several research aspects of political developments, something that the systemic media may not have done, intentionally or not (Michailidou & Trenz 2014, De Zúñiga 2015, Rovisco 2016, Humprecht & Esser 2018), but it seemed that digital media was ultimately much more biased and directed by political forces than the traditional media. Thus, they intensified reactions, provoked violence against politicians and went far beyond the principles and ethics of journalism (Bennett and Pfetsch 2018:244). Media’s role as the ‘fourth power of the state’ should not be left in the hands of anonymous actors or any ‘civil society’. According to Zarali and Frangolikolopoulos (2013) in Greece, after 1974, media have consolidated a nationalist perspective in the political system and public opinion, which is considered to be ‘naturalized’, self-evident and non-problematic. In foreign affairs and international news, information and images concerning the politics and societies of ‘Others’, and especially of neighboring countries, are fragmented, resulting in: 1) the reproduction and strengthening of nationalist and ethnocentric perceptions and 2) the dominance of the so- called ‘national issues’ in the news content of the media. Greek newsportals and blogs give special prominence to that ‘national ego’, as argue Zarali and Frangolikolopoulos.

3.3 Low visibility: failures of participation Newsworthiness of EU supranational politics is set out firstly by general rules of journalism based on audience-oriented routines (agenda setting process) and secondly, by the political reality, which is treated differently than national politics (Gattermann and

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Vasilopoulou 2015:122). As noted, layers of European journalism infrastructure cannot objectively be created, the concept of pan-European media has also failed to function and nationalization has characterized the EU subject matter.

3.3.1 The Public Sphere issue The problem of little concern to EU news affects not only Greeks but almost all Europeans, more or less depending on the country. On a theoretical and academic basis, the problem is linked to the absence of a European Public Sphere (hereinafter EPS) and it is linked to the so-called “democratic deficit” in the EU, in a sense of “which comes first, the chicken or the egg?”… However, we believe that the discourse about the EPS is put in a completely wrong position, as evidenced by the experience of some historical examples in the evolution of EU’s integration, from the referenda and “no” votes on the European Constitutional Treaty in France and the Netherlands in 2005, to the great problems experienced by the European project, during the last decade: the euro debt crisis, the refugee crisis and recently the COVID-19 crisis. The withdrawal of Great Britain from the EU is a special condition that does not representatively describe the trends in the ‘public opinion’ of the EU, because this country had never been effectively integrated into the EU ideal. As we will examine in the next three sub-chapters, the problem starts with the lack of awareness of the essential challenges, the public interest and the common future, by the citizens of the EU Member States. And, in this regard, we now examine another important debate about European Identity (EI): if it can exist, if it should exist, how it is built, etc. The fundamental and structural status of the EU that resembles a puzzle with 27 pieces today, a puzzle that sometimes takes the form of a painting when the EU solves problems, overcomes deadlocks, achieves its founding objectives and simultaneously a puzzle which sometimes, transforms into a splatter film that shows only blood, without any meaning, script and content. This is where major disagreement over the future of the EU begins, which is obviously not as simple as former Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker wanted to say a few years ago9. The various scenarios put forward in the public discussion for the next day of the EU by both Juncker and French President Emmanuel Macron (Juncker 2017, Macron 2017), reflect the relentless quest by Europe’s politicians for a better and more effective EU, such as their

9 At the beginning of the crisis, as Prime Minister of Luxembourg at that time, Juncker, had stated that while the governments of the EU Member States knew what measures they needed to legislate, but would not be re-elected if they were to implement those measures… (Frangonikopoulos 2017:130). 27

respective foreign and security policy plans reveal in the main and undeniable assumption of EU’s inefficiency respectively, in the specific sectors, where the world is re-ordered, over the last three decades (EEAS 2016). Turning now to the EPS, it is of great importance for the research of the dissertation, as it touches the core of our main concern: do the European institutions lack “newsworthiness”?

3.3.2 Definitions and basic concepts about EPS The EPS is not a mechanism to be enforced from the top down to the peoples of the EU Member States, making them to relinquish the local, regional and national public spheres by feeling like protagonists or subject to specific political orders of a public space that was suddenly extended substantially and more than the limited public space in which they lived until yesterday. It is therefore not easy for them to suddenly become interested in what is happening in the EU, when there are even people who show no interest to participate in civic life, anyway. Thus, the first negative answer to our basic question stems from the problematic functioning of the EPS, which we will narrowly limit to the relationship between: policy- making by the institutions and the current EU leadership on the one hand, and EU citizens on the other - in this case, citizens of Greece. Contrary to what the Eurosphere project (Sicakkan 2013a and 2013b, Kraus and Sciortino 2013) has recorded, for example, we will focus on a) those two actors in the center of the political system, without whom as Habermas says (2006:416), no political public sphere could be put to work: “professionals of the media system—especially journalists who edit news, reports, and commentaries—and politicians who are both the coauthors and addressees of public opinions”, and b) the public interest that is stimulated or not by what is happening in the EU. According to Trenz, “the public sphere has primary an intermediary function between political rule makers and those who are potentially affected by the exercise of political rule”, though with the passing of time, the former were not necessarily national governments, and the latter were not necessarily national constituencies because public sphere theorizing was applied to new forms of governance and civil society beyond the nation-state (2009:3). The seminal influence of the internet for example, has provoked the concept for the mobilization of global civil society, a public sphere increasingly differentiated and diversified with regard to people, issues and attitudes, where the “dotcauses” (=political networks, which mobilize support for social causes primarily) act (Frangonikolopoulos 2012:12,13,15, Castells 2012). 28

Thirty five years before Habermas, John Dewey (1927:154-5) talking about the US at the beginning of the 20th century, when a government was facing the challenge of integrating its population, defined how the public comes into being and he concluded that the problem of the public is a world which suffers more from leaders and authorities than from the masses. “The essential need is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion”, he said (ibid:224 and Lingenberg 2006:125). Dewey’s description resembled more the EU, than the Habermasian ideal-typisch way of understanding what the public sphere is about, as it was brought to debate by Jürgen Habermas’ pioneering work “Strukturwandelder ffentlichkeit” - first published in 1962 and only translated a quarter of a century later under the title “Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” (1989 and 1974). By removing the restrictions of space-territory, national characteristics, social divisions etc., three decades later Habermas (1996:359) rectified his premature forms of public sphere and he remarked that the political public sphere is like “a sounding board for problems that must be processed by the political system because they cannot be solved elsewhere”. He also stressed the function of the public sphere as “a network that gives citizens an equal opportunity to take part in an encompassing process of focused political communication” (Habermas 2001:17), taking into account the specificities of the EU. During the last thirty years, there’s been an increasing interest about the EPS, more or less in its idealized Habermasian form and from the point of view of a political “hybrid” that the EU constitutes (White 2020). We will attempt - as far as this is possible - to keep away our argumentation about the public sphere from the crucial role that it can actually play in the democratization and integration of the EU and to insist on Deweyan’s conceptualization of the public sphere, which consists of:  political functions: it represents an intermediary space between civil society and political decision-makers, it permits the circulation of ideas, arguments and opinions, it forces politicians to justify their decisions in order to gain public legitimization and finally, it allows citizens to make justified electoral voting decisions  audience level: citizens which turn to be publics by participating in communicative interactions, become constitutive of the public sphere (Lingenberg 2006:125). Our approach is closer to the Pragmatic or Affirmative understanding of the public sphere as Nieminen (2008:14) lists the four main ways in approaching the issue (the pragmatic, the processual, the sceptical, and the radical critical understandings of the EPS). The basic claim

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of this rather bureaucratic approach can be said to be that the elements for the EPS are there, the problem is in the execution of the European Union’s PR-work and communication (see also page 43).

Main concern of the present dissertation is also news media which are seen by the most researchers, as a major agent in structuring, asserting, and sustaining public spheres, because the media are supposed “to put forward and amplify different voices, rather than be dominated by a certain group of actors while excluding others” (Oleart 2018:104). The role of the news media is center stage, though without consensus as to how they might hinder or contribute to building a sense of European identity (Heinderyckx 2018:45). “The media participate in the construction and spread of ideas, values, interests and opinions on Europe and the European Union, which in turn affect the social construction of a European identity” (Scalise 2014:55). “Messages, organizations, and leaders who do not have a presence in the media do not exist in the public mind” says the influential sociologist M. Castells (2009:194), though he underlines that although “it is in the media space that political battles of all kinds are fought, won, and lost”, the media don’t dictate politics and policies (Castells 2004:30). Actually, mass media are seen as the most important forum of the public sphere for democracies since they provide a “vision of the public sphere” to a vast number of people. The role of journalists is crucial too, as they significantly impact on the functioning of a public sphere by making “decisions about the selection and presentation” of news. Statham (2010a:3-4) maintains that it depends on media actors how a public sphere is not only visible, but it exists or not and what type of Europeanized public politics is possible, as far as the EU is concerned. He also claims that the journalist is not only a fair-minded analyst of political events, but sometimes also a political actor, as journalists are committed to more than the neutral transmission of political facts (2010b:127) – a passive role as “infrastructure” of democracy contrary to the more active role as a “player” in democracy, according to Trenz (2008: 293).

Regarding the actors of the public sphere, W. Stefanie (2017:751) distinguishes between the political centre and the periphery, or else the governmental and the intermediary system, where respectively belong: (1) governmental actors, such as the government, the legislature, the judiciary and the political administration, (2) intermediary actors, representing collective interests, including political parties and civil society, as well as (3) the citizens of the respective political community. Citizens themselves don’t represent an autonomous actor

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group but are located at the level of informal civil society which opposes to the state (Habermas 1996:367). For Habermas (1996:376), as we already said, the journalists, publicity agents and members of the press are a distinctive group of actors. The Eurosphere project (Sicakkan 2013:21) and Koopmans (2010:101) count different types of social and political actors in the articulation of an inclusive EPS.

The EU’s political system is characterised by multi-level governance, where “decision- making competencies are shared by actors at different levels”. Both actors from the European, but also from the national level are relevant for the actor structure of the EPS. Thus, according to Eriksen, the public sphere is “the social room that is created when individuals discuss common concerns in front of an audience” (2005:341).

3.3.3 The “could be” European Public Sphere Finally, summarizing the definitions and theoretical frameworks of public sphere, we have presented so far, we deal with neither an institution nor an organization, but with a communication network and a social construction that emerges in the process in which people debate about controversial issues in the public (Van de Steeg and Risse 2010, Risse 2003, Risse 2014). The public sphere does not exist as an entity prior to decision-making bodies, i.e., as a place where “the people” come together and deliberate upon who they are or would like to be, and then form a collective will of “the nation” or “the class” (Eriksen 2005:345). “A public sphere is not something out there waiting to be discovered. Instead, a public sphere evolves and is constructed around specific arguments” (Van de Steeg et al. 2003:15). It has to be clear that public debates have only an informative function and no administrative validity, and that the public sphere cannot shape and implement decisions but possesses the power to challenge and, if necessary, force the institutions of the political system to amend decisions (Conrad 2010:218, Conrad 2014:65, Brüggemann 2010:8). According to one of the first definitions of the term: The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labour (Habermas 1989:27).

Applied to the European context, if we deprive the theoretical arsenal of public sphere theorizing and concepts such as a) statehood, identity, culture, language, national borders etc., and b) democracy, demos and integration, what appears to be missing – or actually, to be

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searched for during the last two decades - is a European Public Sphere, “a truly inter- or transnational shared space where those holding political and bureaucratic power confront a well-informed, critical public” (Risse 2002:1, Gripsrud 2007:480). For Triandafyllidou et al. (2009:267), the really existent European Public Sphere is not transnational but international in character and it has got a certain form which is recorded by the evidence provided by the six crisis events that their research examined. The choice of the international EPS is dictated by the fact that in none of their cases was there a significantly equal (social, political, economic, synchronic or diachronic) interpretation of the reported events. Accordingly, they claim that “the international character of the European Public Sphere does not support the conception of Europe as an ethically charged notion in pan-European public discourses” (ibid.:268). The EPS has a temporality that is accurately described by Conrad (2014:65) when he talks about the coming into being rather than existence of public spheres as communicative spaces: “they come into being to the extent that their participants or observers experience (and refer to) them as shared forums, stages, arenas etc.”. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since the perspectives of the EU elites and the “permissive consensus” era has ended. Since the structural reforms suggested by Commissioner Pinheiro of Delors’s Commission, when individual Commissioners regarded the communication as a waste of time (Meyer 1999:624), and after the constitutional debates and the referenda in France and the Netherlands which were arguably the first (and only) creation of an EU deliberative public sphere of communication in which ideas about how to democratize the EU flowed freely (“a critical juncture”, Fossum & Schlesinger 2007:1) (Meyer 2005:1, Schmidt 2013:24), the European Commission saw the need for bridging the “communication gap” between the European Union and its citizens (Bijsmans & Altides 2007:324) and stressed that “Europe needs to find its place in the existing national, regional and local “public spheres” and the public discussion across Member States must be deepened”. The “White Paper on a European Communication Policy” (European Commission 2006) which was the second attempt after the failure of 2001 (European Commission 2001) for a ‘widening gulf between the EU and the people it serves’, identified a shortlist of five areas for action against the “communication deficit” in partnership with the other EU institutions, Member States and civil society, a shortlist “not carved in stone”, which it grows as society evolves and technologies change… We learn from the White Paper

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on European Communication Policy that the EPS should occur at national rather than supranational or international levels (Triandafyllidou et al. 2009:3). Schlesinger called it the “fallacy of distribution” (1993:12). Heinderyckx claims that “making a EPS the necessary condition to achieve European integration exposes the very idea of an integrated political union as a mere utopian and groundless chimera confined to policy papers and political rhetoric” (2018:57) and during the last two decades, a number of prominent authors have argued for the need to create a EPS to make the EU more legitimate. However, we take the view that with the “unity in diversity” axiom, applied on the integration process such as the “sphereness” attempt (Fischer 2000, Beck 2005:116, Trenz 2009:16), the lack of a EPS beyond national borders in the EU (Nieminen 2008) might not be a democratic problem “per se”, as long as national public spheres are Europeanised (Risse 2003, Koopmans and Statham 2010, Statham 2010a) or “transnationalised” enough for citizens to remain informed and able to participate in the EU policy-making process (Brüggemann 2010:8, Habermas 2015:8, Oleart 2018:98). The problem begins when the local, regional or national media focus on issues of domestic interest which do not necessarily coincide with European affairs (Bijsmans & Altides 2007:326), plus the factors such as linguistic boundaries, cultural heterogeneity and mostly the strong bonds between national mass media and national mass audiences which constitute some insurmountable barriers to the formation of a unified EPS (Pfetsch 2004:4). It should not be forgotten that (1) the public communication can only reflect the actual distribution of power, which in the EU is articulated between the various European and the national levels, as well as (2) the European decision-making process is primarily intergovernmental or primarily supranational in nature (ibd. 5). The EPS is defined by the Eurosphere project, as “a constellation of historically existing and new ethnic/religious, minority-related, national, and transnational public spaces which constitute an agonistic system of discourses and alliances that are in conflict and contestation with each other and with the EU-initiated trans-European public spaces” (Sicakkan 2013:1)10. To put it simply, the need for an EPS does not mean that we have to invent a new one, but rather, the already existing infrastructure of the existing national public spheres is sufficient for Europe-wide communication. As Habermas notes, “National arenas only have to be opened up to each other. And the existing national media… must learn to report also on the

10 The European Union is starting to develop an enormous , extending way beyond its natural borders that could be called the “Eurosphere”. In this approach, “Eurosphere is defined as the spheres of those individuals and groups who participate in the European integration processes actively or are directly affected by its consequences” (ibid.:67). 33

discussions being conducted in each other’s countries about the issues of common concern to all citizens of the Union” (2015:8). The fact that contemporary media discourse is focused on similar themes at the same time is at least an indicator for “their openness to the idea of a EPS” (Zografova et. al 2012:79). Thomas Risse (2003:1, 7) wrote that an ideal typical EPS would emerge: 1. if and when the same European themes are discussed at the same time at similar levels of attention across national public spheres and media, 2. if and when similar frames of reference, meaning structures and patterns of interpretation are used across national PS and media, 3. if and when a transnational community of communication emerges in which speakers and listeners recognize each other as legitimate participants in a common discourse (Risse 2002:6-8, Van de Steeg et al. 2003, Van de Steeg and Risse 2010:6, Risse 2010:109, Risse 2014).

The case of the economic crisis in Greece has the aforementioned characteristics, as well as the management of the refugee crisis. A key criterion in making pan-European decisions by the EU institutions remained the national interests of each Member State. When, for example, the government of George Papandreou desperately asked for loans from European partners so that the country would not go bankrupt in 2010, Angela Merkel was reluctant to give the green light, because of the local elections in Rhineland-Westphalia: Greek rescue may have cost her at the polls. In the Netherlands and Finland there were parties that promised in the run-up to the election that they would not approve a single cent more for Greece, while in Slovakia developments in rescue packages led to the collapse of the government in 2011. “No other issue became so toxic to a number of states members, as well as the restructuring of the Greek debt. In pure economic terms, debt relief at the beginning of the crisis was absolutely necessary... This was often admitted off the record and by some officials from the Member States who otherwise strongly opposed such a prospect” stress Dendrinou & Varvitsioti (2019:371).

3.3.4 The digital transformations of public sphere New mass media and social media obsolete the notion of the Habermasian public sphere, because the ways in which citizens engage in civic and political activities today ‘deinstitutionalize’ the public sphere which is the result of the dominance of large-scale bureaucratic organisations and the general influence of mass society. “The relations between local and distant social forms and events become correspondingly ‘stretched’…” argues Giddens, defining “modernity” and “globalization” (1990:64,115,175, Gil de Zúñiga 2015:3153). Massive social movements have the power to change the fate of a country and 34

significantly influence developments in a state like the Arab Spring. Castells’ “Networks of Outrage and Hope” (2009, 2012) give another purpose to the public space, from cyberspace to urban space. Bennett and Pfetsch (2018:250, also Blumler and Coleman 2015) propose the reconsideration of such core concepts as gatekeeping, framing, indexing, agenda setting, because they point out that “contemporary political communication increasingly takes place in contexts defined by diminished citizen attention, hybrid media systems, the rise of undemocratic movements and parties, and networked, often polarized, political information flows”. In the last two decades, a large field of research is opening up before us as the concept of the public sphere is transformed, along with political communication, because cyberspace demolishes the boundaries between journalism and non-journalism and fosters the emergence of multiple mini-public spheres (Dahlgren 2001:75). Political communication is increasingly being geared to smaller and smaller specific target groups (ibid. 81), which can be just called “online forums” (Tsaliki 2002:97). For Rasmussen (2008), it is not just a matter of… size of the new public spheres but also, a matter of topics, styles etc. The way politics is acting nowadays, in combination with the evolving public space-time in which it appears, partially and theoretically weakens the traditional media, albeit the truth is that cyberspace for a large part of the population, is a parallel world with its own, completely unknown. It is also true that the issues which concern those multiple mini-public spheres – the “dotcauses” according to Frangonikolopoulos (2012) – need sometimes the traditional media in order to gain visibility (Dahlberg 2004). The interaction between mainstream media and the Internet that characterizes media politics in the digital age, says M. Castells (2009:234): “While the filters established by owners, advertisers, editors, and professional journalists prime or block information and images, the Internet remains the domain of choice for unsupervised messages that broaden the scope of sources of information and misinformation, trading lesser credibility for greater diversity”. A new terminology for the fragmented national public spheres due to the digital technologies, is presented by Esser & Pfetsch (2020:2), who talk about metaphors like ‘echo- chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’: they describe “a new scenario in which like-minded individuals only consume news from the set of outlets that match their interests and beliefs” (also Sunstein 2007, Michailidou 2012:367). At the same time, there is a wealth of research that confirms the firm grip that global news agencies or algorithm based news aggregators have on national public spheres, whereby a lot of the content that national media outlets

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provide is either directly bought or copy-pasted from transnational news corporations (Michailidou and Trenz 2020:8). Coleman (2001:118) says about the three ways that new media effect upon civic communication: citizens have access to information that allows public scrutiny, public deliberation is unmediated and therefore, politicians - representatives’ job dramatically changes. Coleman concludes that healthy democracy doesn’t depend on quantity but on quality: Strong representation requires not only better representatives who are more connected to the public who gave them their power, but also citizens who understand how to be democratically represented: how to seek and use the records of their representatives; how to ask meaningful and incisive questions; how to hold their legislators to account; and how to change their minds when the evidence is against them. Anyone can be a cynic who relentlessly decries the inadequacies of ‘them up there’… (ibid: 124).

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4. The research

4.1 Interviews with journalists As a basic tool of methodological approach to the topic of our dissertation, we conducted interviews with representatives of some of the major media in Greece, in order to record their own point of view on whether or not and if not why the news about the EU isn’t ‘catchy’. There is no such an overview from the Greek editors and journalists’ perspectives in the relevant literature, contrary to the Greek correspondents’ narratives for example, which are already recorded by a few surveys (Archetti 2012, Papathanassopoulos and Giannouli 2014, Frangonikolopoulos and Papadopoulou 2020, Michailidou and Trenz 2020). We focused on the print media, as there is more leeway in addressing greater range of topics. We also included the state news agency (APE-MPE) and the public television (ERT) in the survey. APE-MPE’ articles and reports about the EU could provoke Greek mass media into writing and presenting more news about the EU. ERT on the other hand, from its founding mission, has got the obligation to deal with issues that do not fit in the program of private television stations (public broadcasting has got more hard news, more international news and less tabloidized news, Esser & Pfetsch 2020:28). We spoke to the Heads of two Departments, Dimitris Apokis, Editor in Chief for International News and responsible for ERT’s Correspondents and Fanis Papathanasiou, Head of the Journalistic Research’s Department. We also interviewed Klio Nikolaou, Journalist in the Department of International News and one the two presenters of the TV programme “It Happens in Europe”. The newspapers that participated in our research are: “” (Zois Tsolis, Managing Editor), “” (Kostas Papadioxos, Editor-in-Chief of political reporting), “To ” (Grigoris Tziovaras, Parliamentary journalist), “Avgi” (Kostas Poulakidas, Parliamentary journalist), “Eleftheros Typos” (Panos Amyras, Managing Editor), “H (EFSYN)” (Dimitris Koukloumperis, journalist). The interviews were conducted between October and November of 2020 via telephone or Skype and they were recorded. The participants were first asked if they agree their name to be mentioned in our thesis and they all said ‘yes’. Subsequently, we addressed the following general research questions, with some sub- questions: RQ1: Do all EU news have value for you or only those issues that concern Greece?

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RQ2: The EU news that doesn’t concern Greece takes the position of national or international news in your agenda? RQ3: Do your readers/viewers show real interest in EU news and if they don’t, what’s the reason? We applied the model of semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions. Interviews are the most commonly used data collection method (Taylor 2005:41) and the semi-structured format is the most frequently used interview technique in qualitative research (Kallio et al. 2016:2955, Dornyei 2007:136). The interviews were generally organised around a set of predetermined open-ended questions, with other questions emerging from the dialogue between us and the interviewees (DiCicco-Bloom and Crabtree 2006:315).

4.1.1 Findings “Proto Thema”, is the only medium of our research that doesn’t have a permanent correspondent in Brussels and paper’s journalists cover only the important facts close by. “EFSYN” and “To Vima” are in a transitional period, because their correspondents have 38

initiated procedures for retirement. APE-MPE has only one correspondent (as opposed to three journalists during the previous years) and ERT employs two permanent correspondents in Brussels. The news feed from international news agencies (Reuters, Bloomberg etc.) completes the reports of every medium organisation. The answers to whether the EU is an interesting story or otherwise a ‘catchy’ issue, are leaning towards ‘no’. ‘Catchy’ as they all agree, is the EU for sure, when a major event is at stake for Greece, such as the risk of the country leaving the EMU (Economic and Monetary Union). There were times when Greeks really followed the developments in the European Union minute by minute. P. Amyras remembers that in the dramatic period of the first half of 2015, when Greece’s position in the EU was literally in the air, public’s interest was great for any news coming from Brussels or Berlin. Therefore, public’s interest is getting bigger in critical circumstances. In calm political times, the interest diminishes, but at this point the opinions differ regarding the great or less interest of the Greeks concerning what is happening in the EU. “To Vima” and “Avgi” are considered to be traditionally pro-European papers. As Tsolis says, the EU is the principal orientation for his paper, contrary to media which give prominence to the American factor. The same policy was supported by the newspaper even during the difficult years 2011-2015, when Greeks’ fury turned unjustly against the EU too. “Avgi” and “EFSYN” dedicate weekly inserts and special supplements on the EU. The first one publishes the Greek version of “Le Monde diplomatique” and once a week in detail all the parliamentary activity of the Left European Parliament’s political group (GUE/NGL). The Greek Public Service Broadcasting (ERT) has two permanent correspondents in Brussels and ERT1 is the only Greek channel that broadcasts a programme dedicated to Europe, a talk show called “It happens in Europe” – the previous title was “EUROPE”. The two correspondents’ job during the important events is also assisted by the one who covers the government but also specialized journalists when something specific is to be discussed (Defense, Health, etc.). “News as they are…” is ERT’s motto and Dimitris Apokis says that uninterrupted coverage of EU is provided through daily news and information programmes. According to

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the updated regulation of ERT’s news sector there is an interconnection of all kinds of reporting and broadcasts with the work of correspondents. We tell the news without filtering, impartially. Our correspondents broadcast what is happening in the country they are in, not as the EU or the US wants, but as it is. There is neither European nor American orientation in the news we present. We present all the news and not what our viewers want, providing a 360 degree awareness of what is happening in Europe. This is the role of public television and responsible media (Apokis).

As far as the nationalization of EU news is concerned, Papadioxos claims that EU today occupies much more space in the Greek public sphere than it did 15 years ago. We are more concerned in Europe in 2020 and that’s a progress in our debate, he can say, after 15 years of professional experience. An essential difference between “Kathimerini” and “To Vima” is that a meeting between Chancellor Merkel and President Macron about EU’s future in the first newspaper will take place in International News, while in the second, in Political Reports. The latter proves the pro-European character of the paper, according to Tsolis. The same applies to “Avgi”. A more independent and detached approach to EU news regardless of labels (pro- European, pro-American, etc.) is followed by “EFSYN”, as Koukloumperis argues: “there is no national lens in reporting the EU news”. Amyras supports the dominant trend in European media, describing the way that his paper covers the EU news, but he insists that EU politics’ influence over the daily life in Greece is much more important than others believe: I would say that we are always looking for the extension of journalism in the Greek data. We all know that every decision of the European Union affects life, the economy or the daily life of citizens in all member states. Though what we often hear that the decision-making center has moved to Brussels is not far from reality, we do not believe that EU news is news far from our horizon. We give priority to all the issues that affect Greece, but now most of the news from the Commission, no matter how distant it sounds, affect to a greater or lesser degree the whole of the Union. For example, a North Sea fisheries agreement may seem insignificant to Greek affairs, but it can be a model or a precursor to a similar agreement in the Aegean and the Mediterranean Sea, which will radically change the lives of thousands of our professional fishermen and overturn correlations in domestic production.

That’s an argument that is strongly supported by Fanis Papathanasiou too, Head of ERT’s Department of Journalistic Research, who says that:

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There is no case for a bilateral meeting to be televised without Greece being involved, at least a little, or even if it does not concern Greece, but there is a statement by Margaritis Schoinas, let’s say. Only Greek-Turkish conflicts and pandemic news are currently being broadcasted from Brussels nowadays… ERT together with a few print media and the public radio are the last ones that still present news from the EU, purely European news, at a rate of 15-20%.

Gr. Tzovaras is one of the oldest Parliamentary journalists in Greece. He was the director and publisher of a magazine named “Parliament and European Parliament” during 1997- 2000. The magazine was covering the work of the two Parliaments, but it was soon proved to be a nonviable effort, in economic terms. Talking about his current job (“Proto Thema”), Tziovaras says that when EU news doesn’t contain Greece, it is no news... The same thing happens with international news in Greece and that’s a matter of the whole Greek press: I do not believe that readers and listeners form the media agenda. If the EU rulers had to say something important the people would listen to them and then we would have no choice but to listen to the public and be there. Could anyone remember a crucial vote concerning our lives in the European Parliament as opposed to the US Congress for example? The European Parliament serves more as a forum for the exchange of views rather than a decision-making center.

For George Kouvaras, correspondent in Brussels for more than 30 years who now lives in Athens and works for APE-MPE, EU news is “too Greek”… When the European media have journalists specialized in economics, health, diplomacy, etc. the Greek correspondent is obliged to know every science and subject and must talk about the coronavirus one day and the other day about European monetary policy; plus, something else: Greek journalists, in every great event, only follow Greece; they go to the press conference of the Greek Prime Minister and miss what is said in the other interviews. The information is one-sided, since no one is going to ask a question the German Chancellor or the French President... or even to hear what they are saying. The biggest “scoops” come from the other delegations e.g., in the crisis how can you ignore what the Spaniard or the Italian gave and received in the negotiation, so what information do you have, when you hear only one side?

The latter, however, applies to most Member States, because after meetings of the Council of Ministers, each national minister tends to meet his or her national press representatives, and the secrecy of the meetings allows them to obscure the bargaining and compromises entered into by the other ministers. This is, of course, important for their position in the national political space but the lack of a ‘single sphere’ for EU news allows for this ‘nationalisation’ of issues, argues Kevin (1997:122). Greek public’s concern for EU news is low because the product offered to them is not charming, says Kouvaras. 41

When the product you are proposing to the public is not attractive, you cannot convince the public that what the EU has been doing continues to exist. EU is not coming to overthrow any national reality (Kouvaras).

Poulakidas and Koukloumperis agree with that, saying that EU has been removed from the needs of citizens and it does not directly affect their daily lives. According to Tziovaras, the EU’s institutions are distant and bureaucratic. Greeks and non-Greeks complain that they do not find any answer to what they do and therefore it is fatal for the EU decisions not to reach the average citizen. It is rare for decisions to be made on grand-sounding issues and decisions are likely to be delayed. - The EU does not have an immediate effect on citizens. A decision to be taken at the European Council will need a long time to be put into practice, in contrast to the Greek parliament whose laws, on asylum in universities for example, begin to be implemented - formally - from the day after their vote. And also, the European Parliament is like a well-paid job for politicians, not purely politics (Papadioxos). - The delays and bureaucracy in Brussels are the biggest problems in implementing Europe’s decisions (Tsolis).

Fanis Papathanasiou takes full responsibility for seemingly Greek’s low interest about EU. According to Lloyd and Marconi (2014:44), “the temptation for reporters and editors is to ‘make up interesting stories’, since it is much more fun to think the Commission is banning roast beef or olive oil on the table than following the progression of a directive”. So, in the same vein, F. Papathanasiou believes that the way in which the news about Europe is presented is primarily a problem: The EU is a complex, bureaucratic mechanism and the issues that concern it do not touch the average viewer but a specialized audience, with a superior intellectual base. EU bureaucratic processes aren’t catchy to the common people. But if you personalize an issue and say for example that a decision concerns both Danish fishermen and fishermen of Greece, or Italian cheeses and feta of Epirus, the issues become more personal and therefore more digestible for many. But the journalist must look for it a lot and thoroughly analyze it as an issue... (Papathanasiou).

He finally wonders: how can you justify the fact that Greek TV doesn’t present programmes that specify the decisions of the EU? How can you justify the fact that programmes that would talk about the Common Agricultural Policy aren’t broadcasted in the TV channels of mainland Greece or Thessalia or Crete, let’s say? On the other hand, Apokis and Amyras argue that “catchy” is everything that affects people’s lives.

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Notwithstanding its remaining imperfections EU has got its ups and downs in terms of the role it is called upon to play in the modern world, in favor of its members (Amyras).

Klio Nikolaou along with George Papageorgiou presents the only programme about Europe in Greek TV and in particular, in ERT1. Every TV episode includes more than five reportages on the subject of the show, interviews with experts and chat with Greek Members of the European Parliament. A video always presents the review of the previous week and what it is scheduled for next. Nikolaou estimates that as time goes by, the show increases the viewing figures, and the people are more and more interested in its issues. This follows from the television audience surveys but also from the reactions on social media. Talking about show’s philosophy, Nikolaou said: We always try to bring to our show the Greek dimension - it makes sense - but in general we try to emphasize the European side of things. We will reach the point “Greece” but this is not what we want from the beginning… It is bad the way we present the news, news to be put into the national context. We journalists need to be better informed not with the narrow view of Greece but as a globalized society that we are. Europe is the most important political power in the world, and we need to understand and then, explain to the audience the difficulties of having its own foreign policy, its own army, etc.

The programme’s gist and intention is to stress that the EU is not an Automatic Teller Machine (ATM), says Nikolaou: Our intention is to say that everything that happens in Europe concerns us directly. A legislation that is being passed today from the European Parliament, for the Common Agricultural Policy, for construction companies, etc., will come to be implemented very soon in Greece too. So whoever is involved in the constructions, must know the EU legislation in order to adapt.

For ERT, there is no ‘catchy’ news, but only reporting… Finally, the incomplete integration of the EU member states into the great edifice of a united Europe is also confirmed by the exploitation of the news flow in the country concerned: EU news in Greece is treated - when it does not touch the country itself - as international – foreign news, on terms affecting the selection and flow of really international news about the rest of the world, as it was mentioned by McQuail (2010:223). “The nearer the location of news events is to the city, or nation of the intended audience, the more likely it is to be noticed”; that is a general tendency in agenda setting, says McQuail (ibid. 263), together with the other news selection factors (ibid. 268). Michailidou and Trenz (2020:2) stress that what we witness over the last two decades is “an increasingly tense and opposing relationship between EU institutions, journalism, the 43

news media and audiences”. “There is an EU parlance of differentiated integration that develops in parallel to the parlance of the people”, they say (ibid: 3). We could distinguish journalists’ answers to the question “why the EU isn’t catchy?” into three categories: 1) Citizens are not attracted to EU news because the EU seems to them unfamiliar as a stranger. The subject in this negative concept is citizen. 2) The EU is unattractive. It has failed on many levels, the crises follow one another. For five years, for example, the EU has been suffering from refugee crisis but is still unable to obtain an immigration policy. It cannot mobilize the civil society; it is not intended to overthrow any national reality. 3) It is first and foremost a matter of bad PR and communication for the EU. “The EU Commission does not manage to make its stories interesting…” say Lloyd and Marconi (2014:28). The extreme forms of PR are labelled as propaganda and dialogue by Brüggemann (2010:8). “Propaganda as a concept of information policy pursues persuasive goals and employs manipulative means” he says and he adds: “the PR of the Commission served to clean up after political decisions. It served to communicate political decisions rather than generate a political dialogue preceding political decisions” (ibid: 15). The latter is media’s job. Only the media can take dialogues with citizens to the wider public. But before we get there, Conrad (2010:215-6) warns that we must avoid the ‘mismatch’ between administrative and communicative power, to the extent that decisions are taken at the supranational level while opinion formation remains at the national level. Communicative power by the EU needs to be exercised at the same level as that where political decisions are made, in order to avoid the communicative deficit, i.e. the public sphere deficit. Plus, journalists do not properly cover the ‘EU project’ in order to be understood by the public. Talking about journalism though, we stress the second part, the contribution of a good story-telling to knowing the EU better. The story-telling techniques used by journalists when they present EU news could close the gap of understanding the EU by the citizens and of choices between journalists and news consumers (Boczkowski & Peer 2011:868). In conclusion, what has emerged in this chapter is that the majority of journalists do not charge the citizens with the main responsibility for the fact that the audience is not interested enough in the EU news. ‘Product’s’ popularity is low because of the product itself but also because of the way it is marketed to ‘consumers’.

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4.2 Survey Those who submitted their replies to our questionnaire about Europe that we set out via Facebook and via two news media web sites (www.pbnews.gr and www.epirusnews.eu), during the period from 14 October to 11 November 2020, appeared to have a predisposition that, indeed, EU news is not very popular. The questionnaire was made with a form of docs.google.com, which is very easy to use. The questionnaire consists of 13 open - ended questions (Dornyei 2007:107). The survey was open to everyone by filling in an email address, in order to avoid duplicate answers and to ensure the greatest possible reliability of the sample. We deliberately did not include in our internet poll details of the participants’ identity; we deliberately did not distinguish the answers based on the age, gender or place of residence of the respondents, on the one hand because our sample is not too large and on the other hand because the aim of this dissertation is to record for the first-time behavior and attitudes towards the EU news in the general population of Greece. After all, we aim to record that part of the population that prefers the informational rather than the entertainment media use (Meulemann 2012) and therefore, a further sub-categorisation of our respondents wouldn’t help our survey at all. Moreover, race, income, education, and gender have been proved to be important socio- political characteristics that have an impact on how the public view roles of journalism (Vos et al. 2019:1112) and our purpose is only to record a general trend. We received 337 questionnaire replies, a representative but not very large sample, the results of our survey, however, are straightforward and leave no room for doubt about what is being recorded. The majority of our respondents ask for more information about the EU; they argue that the EU has a significant impact on their lives; they consider the European elections as an important political process and they don’t vote singers, actors or famous footballers for Members of the European Parliament. The most relevant research to our survey measures international or global news and their position in national media, across the world. It does not matter whether an increasing part of the Greek population tends to use the internet as the main source of news, particularly among young people (Papathanassopoulos et al. 2013:697, Newman et al. 2020:72), because a recent survey by Aalberg et al. (2013:399) presents that among 11 countries, Greek respondents show the strongest public interest in international news (Figure 5).

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In conclusion, Aalberg et al. (2013:403) stress that: When much of the mainstream news media marginalize foreign affairs, citizens are likely to suffer. They are not provided with information relevant to foreign policy decision making; and this gap is clearly reflected in their knowledge of international current affairs.

Given that public service broadcasters, according to many surveys, has proven to favor ‘hard news’ information and to produce higher levels of knowledge about domestic and international affairs than do commercial broadcasters (Curran et al. 2009, Soroka et al. 2013), and given also that in countries with strong public service broadcasters, citizens’ interest in international news is significantly increased, public service broadcaster could shoulder the burden of educating Greeks on EU logic and operation. As Curran et al. (2009) say, the public service model can make television news more accessible on leading channels and it also tends “to minimize the knowledge gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged and therefore contributes to a more egalitarian pattern of citizenship”. Starting from the USA, public service broadcasters in many countries followed a path to decline as far as the quality of media content is concerned, and from the ‘social responsibility’ tradition they increasingly turned to soft journalism (ibid). Greek public service broadcasting, despite the problems of government’s stranglehold, in times when it is allowed by governments to operate impartially, commands a large television audience against private broadcasters. Thus, Greece keeps in its possession an important tool of good political communication, while the others are converging towards the entertainment-centred model of American television. The latter trend seems to foster an impoverished public life characterised by declining exposure to serious journalism and by reduced levels of public knowledge.

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4.2.1 Findings of the poll In specific terms, the majority of our respondents say that “they are interested in EU news (including the decisions of the Commission and the European Parliament’s legislative process and resolutions)”: Enough 67.1%, Very much 18.7% (Graph 1).

These answers are perhaps the result of the weight that the vast majority of respondents recognize that the EU has got in their lives. “Do you think that what is decided in the EU affects your life?” was the question and the replies “Very Much” and “Enough” hit almost 98%, 52.5% and 45.4% respectively (Graph 2).

The vast majority of respondents state with confidence that “(they) Know the EU governance, operation and decision-making models” and only 23.4% admit that they have

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little or no idea about the subject (Graph 3). “Enough” takes 59.6% and “Very Much” takes 16.9%.

At the same time, however, 31.5% say that the Council of Europe instead of the European Commission, which is the right, is an EU institution (Graph 4). The right answer was given by 68.5%. Respondents are rather divided as far as the question about the EU news flow is concerned. “EU news is being reported in the media from which you choose to stay informed?”: 47.8 say “Enough” and 42.7% say “A little or not at all” (Graph 5). Only 9.5% answer “Very Much”.

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To the next question, respondents say almost unanimously that they want more information about the EU. The question is worded as follows: “If you do not think that there is a lot of news about the EU in the media you attend, would you like to be able to learn more about it?” and the answer “yes” takes 86.9% (Graph 6).

Only 1 out of 5 believe that the European elections are not important, in contrast to 52.2%, which is 1 out of 2, who answer “Enough” (Graph 7). “Very Much” takes 26.1%.

Given that the vast majority of respondents come from the Prefecture of Ioannina, we could say that the answer to the question about the voting criteria in the European Parliament elections as far as the candidates are concerned, is honest… “His/Her established competence in Europe” takes 77.2%, “The political profile (high-ranking or first-class executive of a

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party)” takes 17.2% and finally, only 5.6% say “Recognition… whether it comes from politics or not” (Graph 8). 11

Respondents positively assess Greece’s participation in the EU, saying that the benefits that the country has gained are more than the negative ones, but the percentage of positive opinions decreases when the same question is asked about the Eurozone and the common currency. 79.2% assess positively Greece’s participation in the EU (Graph 9), 62.3% assess positively use of the single currency (Graph 10). That means that 2 out of 10 and almost 4 out of 10 respectively access negatively the EU and the Eurozone.

11 The candidates who obtained the highest number of votes in the 2019 European elections in Ioannina are mostly political figures and not stars – see at https://ekloges.ypes.gr/current/e/home/districts/18/. 50

After that, the answer that “The EU is very responsible or quite responsible for the economic crisis and the Memoranda of Greece” sounds logical. The first answer takes 38.6% and the latter 43.9% (Graph 11). Less than 2 out of 10 respondents believe that the EU has no involvement in Greek economic crisis!

Between the three answers offered to respondents regarding what they consider to be the

EU (Scalise 2014:55), the positive answer “An imperfect political-economic scheme whose founding goal is peace and prosperity of the peoples of Europe” gets the largest percentage

(70.9%). Respectively, 15.4% answered “A bureaucratic mechanism that serves the interests of the elites”, while 13.6% answered “A creating of Europe’s political and economic elites

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with the aim of eradicating the weak (e.g., small and medium-sized enterprises and farmers of my country)” (Graph 12).

Finally, the vast majority of respondents feel very or fairly European as shown by the replies to the question “Europe represents a part of your individual identity…”: 49.9% say “Enough”, 31.5% say “Very” and “Little or not at all” takes 18.7% (Graph 13).

To conclude, the results of our public opinion survey conducted via Internet on a randomised sample of Greek population contain no surprises as far as Greek’s feelings about the EU are concerned. Euroscepticism remains at a low level, although the EU to a great extent is held responsible by citizens for the economic crisis that they experienced after 2010, whereas they believe that much remains to be done by the EU, in order to meet its founding objectives.

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The level of satisfaction with regard to EU news is close to recent Eurobarometer polls: a little more than 1 out of 2 said that he/she is satisfied by the information that he/she gets about the EU. However, almost 9 out of 10 want to know more about the EU and this is a clue that much more attention should be paid to by the Greek media. This is also an unequivocal response to those representatives of the press who claim that the public does not give a damn for what takes place in the EU.

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5. Conclusion

In the beginning of this research, we have in mind a distorted image of Greeks, as the only nation that hasn’t got within their political and social ‘field of vision’ the European Union. EU is for many people in Greece like a cash dispenser, without them being concerned about the origin of the machine money and the political procedures required for the EU to reach a funding project in our home village… Coming to the concluding remarks of this research, the EU’s low visibility touches every single member of this entity and citizens of the - until yesterday - 28 EU member states remain indifferent to news content coming from Brussels, with only slight fluctuations in percentages among the countries. On this scale of interest – indifference to the European news, Greeks are rather close to the EU average. In the Introduction of the present text, two Hypotheses were formulated and these were contrasted with a large bibliography on the EU, journalism and political communication but also with two methodological tools and these bring us to the point to give the answers. So, Hypothesis 1 (The public in Greece doesn’t like the European Union, because EU isn’t glamorous and attractive to its citizens) is confirmed by the overall rule concerning all EU member states. The theoretical reasons for this low interest of Europeans in their “home” are well explained by literature and they are multifactorial. Even if this lack of interest in EU news has been defined by bibliography in a variety of terms such as newsworthiness, visibility, mediatization, cynicism etc., as a concept it has never been quantified and measured to be able to be explained later. A news bulletin with news content exclusively for the EU has never been measured in terms of viewing figures, as is the case with the regular ratings of newscasts and other programs of all TV stations. Similarly, print media has never raised the issue how commercial political news about the EU is because it is taken as a piece of material integral to the rest of the daily newspaper agenda. However, the example of a magazine dedicated exclusively to the Greek and European parliaments, as Gr. Tzovaras told us, was a complete failure, a fact that shows that the European Union is not really so ‘catchy’ in Greece, as politics in general is not ‘catchy’. ‘Catchy’ does not necessarily mean likeable. The EU could be ‘hated’ by many Greeks, as the Eurobarometer records during the last decade, possibly completely unjustifiably, but the people could not remain indifferent to it. On the contrary, the EU could intrigue and interest

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people who do not love it. But this doesn’t happen unfortunately. Greeks’ feeling about the EU is rather apathy, to a great extent – not necessarily ‘cynicism’, as Galpin and Trenz (2017) describe it (=“Cynicism involves the belief that politicians primarily work for their own self-interest rather than for the common good”). The interpretation of this apathy by the Greeks and the Europeans in general towards the EU has never been substantially attempted until today. The debate we are talking about is rather incidental when political and social sciences are concerned with issues such as journalistic cultures, the appropriate way of the EU’s coverage, the choice of topics to be displayed each time by a medium, the ‘sphereness’ issue etc. Even the topics that journalists choose to cover about the EU, such as foreign policy, the internal market, competition markets, are subject to the general principles of journalistic rationality and to framing or priming functions, irrespective of their importance in terms of the political unification of Europe and European integration. As it was already told, a decisive meeting between the leaders of Germany and France that could theoretically seal the future of the EU, depending on the direction of the medium, in most cases in Greece, will not be evaluated as political but as international news and in a bulletin news the event will probably be presented just before sports and weather... Esser et al. (2012:140) talk about the lack of solid theories explaining patterns of political news coverage across time or space. Contrary to Hypothesis 1, literature data and our questionnaire replies rebut our second Hypothesis (Greek Citizens are not interested in the EU and the media adapt to their choice). 86.9% of our poll’s respondents (Graph 6) answer that they want more news about the EU. Research has been done over the past few years on the impact of international news on several countries’ public opinion and vice versa, on the media’s impact on the foreign policy of a country, with the so-called ‘CNN effect’12 for example. In the same manner, one aspect of research in the field of political communication, as far as the European Union is concerned, could be focused on the EU news content. What we need to do is to demonstrate, in a positive way, the advantages of exchanging knowledge, the benefits of social mixing, the greatness of tolerance and the mutual enrichment of the meeting of different cultures. It is the EU’s responsibility to popularize the work produced in Brussels, its discourse and its news, in order to make it more accessible. A populace who consumes more palatable news about the EU can see it with a different eye and finally, political unification could be cultivated at the grassroots, rather than trying to impose it from the top down.

12 The term the CNN effect came to be understood as shorthand for the notion that mainstream news media in general, not just CNN, were having an increased effect upon foreign policy formulation. 55

Judging by the answers that were given by editors in chief and journalists who we talked to, the conclusion drawn by that side of mass communication network - let say the ‘sender’ or the ‘transmitter’ of the news – is the logic of ‘let this cup pass from me’. By simply saying that “people do not care about one or the other”, the one who is responsible for informing them is relieved of the burden of his/her mission and highlights what he deems to be extremely important. However, it does not happen here what it happens, say in the market of all kinds of products and services. People’s consumer habits are surveyed with opinion polls; new technologies enable large companies to research people’s consumption patterns and then ‘bombard’ their timeline on Facebook with ads for similar products and services. The same could happen with the news we ‘consume’ but here the main problem might be that political information is now too cheap and its value is very small, because it is transmitted extremely easily and incredibly quickly through the internet - even worse, ‘churnalism’, the endless recycling of online material, is claimed to be replacing first-hand reporting. As Tai and Chang (2002:252) conclude talking about the international news coverage in the USA, news as presented in the mass media, like any other product, is for the ultimate consumption of its targeted users. For news to reach the final destination, its ingredients first have to cater to the collective interest of the audience. In the study of news as a social phenomenon and its conceptualization as a pervasive political force, it is primarily the notion of audience interest that has attracted the attention of both mass communication scholars and professional media practitioners. “If no one cares to read, watch or listen to the content of news media, does it become news? The question regarding ‘who gives a damn’ to foreign news is illustrative” (ibid. 252). Finally, did we ask newsreaders and viewers to say if that they are or they are not interested in EU news? In the end it may turn out that the Greeks are not interested in Europe at all, but without asking them before, no one has the right to invoke them. Since the inception of modern journalism, news writing and reporting textbooks have recognized the importance of audience interest as one major, if not the most significant, factor influencing what is newsworthy and therefore merits media coverage, this is a field of political and social research that needs to be developed, as part of EU public relations and communication. A systematic survey, over a considerable period of time, of the impact of European news in Greece, could accurately show the magnitude of the gap between journalists and news consumers (Boczkowski & Peer 2011:858) but it might also single out the EU issues that are of most interest to Greeks. As the interviewees of all the media we spoke to said, a “market

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research” has not been done for many years now to the public that ‘consumes’ the news. Economic and commercial dimensions of a newsroom’s products cannot be disregarded, instead “media companies have to accelerate the media content across delivery channels in order to expand revenue opportunities, broaden markets and reinforce consumer loyalties and commitments”, as Jenkins and Deuze say (2008:6), in the competitive digital era. From the results of our internet poll, it has emerged that Greeks are interested in learning more about the EU. ‘Matching’ of audience’s news interest to media’s reports should be a persistent priority for journalism but not the first one for the agenda setting process. Furthermore, journalists’ normative frameworks around the world are largely guided by a very few key roles that have to be served (informer, watchdog, educator, reporter, investigator and monitor). However, what users demand from the media (expectations) or how they evaluate the media’s actual performance (evaluations) has rarely been analyzed in a comparative way, resulting in a great gap: news editors do not always give audiences what they want and other market forces may have a stronger influence on the news agenda. Journalists have to take into account information about their audience in order to produce news that will be noticed but the delicate balance must be pursued so that web analytics will not lead journalism to a culture of ‘clickbait’ because this is a danger in our digital era where audience’s attention is monetized in the form of subscription and advertising revenue. It is also journalists’ duty and obligation to bring Europe closer to the public, because as Risse (2010:112) says: “…the more contentious European policies and politics become and the more social mobilization occurs on European issues, the more we actually observe the emergence of a European public sphere. If political issues are not contested, if European politics remains the business of elites, the attention level of the public toward Europe and the EU will remain low”.

The digital networked media can’t ignore the economic perspective just described but as far as the EU is concerned we should have in our minds that expectation–evaluation discrepancies are also associated with lower levels of media trust and finally with the relationship between the European public and the EU. In this relationship, media has a key role to play. But then again, the EU’s ‘information deficit’ (Clark 2014, Galpin and Trenz 2017) is not a problem to be dealt with unilaterally by the media. From the point of view of European leaders, the most effective strategy for improving aggregate levels of European knowledge may well be for the EU to focus on mechanisms of political learning that have worked at the

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national level, such as the media and public schools and universities. Another challenge, according to Russ (2003:213) should be to create layers of European journalism infrastructures: trade unions, employers, editors, media watchdogs and communication scientists, journalism schools and midcareer educators. And finally, from the perspective of scholars there is great need for more research, both comparative and single-country, across both time and space.

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