The question I am interested in answering is how much exposure does the EU receive in the U.S.? Every day we are barraged with all sorts of media through newspapers, television, blogs and yet another medium with the explosion of microblog sites like Twitter. How much of this media directly relates to the EU?
There has been a significant amount of research on public opinion and media exposure of the EU within Europe itself. Research has been consistent in showing the "communication deficit" and lack of a public sphere in the EU, where citizens actively participate in the political process. But unlike in Europe, there is no polling organization like Eurobarometer that continually monitors public opinion about the EU in the U.S.
Why is studying public opinion about the EU important? Because within a liberal democracy, public opinion should ultimately shape foreign policy and our relations with Europe, through the officials we elect. There has been substantial research done on the relationship between public opinion, the media and foreign policy, and for that reason, along with difficulty of tackling such a complex question, this issue will left out of this investigation.
Because so much media exists, examining the aggregate amount of media an American is exposed to is a daunting question to answer. But with LexisNexis database, which catalogues all media not only in the U.S., but a substantial amount from the world, this question became much simpler to examine. Using the wealth of information collected by LexisNexis is how I will begin to see just how much media we are exposed to regarding the EU on a monthly basis.
All newspapers, television transcripts, and blogs were gathered for May. A search was done on LexisNexis using "European Union" as an organization to retrieve results. These results were also limited to media that was published in the U.S. LexisNexis indexes media through identifiers such as organization, subject, geography, and people to name a few. A search can be conducted using any of these identifiers. For example, a search could have been conducted using geography and searching Europe. An organization search was chosen to retrieve media that directly deals with the European Union. The name of the publication, date, word count, and relevancy score were collected. The relevancy score is a percentage from 60-99 that LexisNexis assigns each piece of media. A score of 60-84 is considered a minor reference, while 85-99 is a major reference. All subjects that received a score of over 84 were also gathered. (For more information on the LexisNexis indexing system please see http://law.lexisnexis.com/infopro/Training-and-Resources/SmartIndexing-Resource-Center )
Using this data, we will look at the month of May in depth. The line graph shows all of the totals for all forms of media over each day of the moth. The most extensive coverage came from U.S. newspapers with a total of 552 stories for an average of 18 stories a day. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times published the most articles and, combined, made up nearly half of all the newspapers, 43 percent. The median word count, which is used because of significant outliers in the sample, came in at 558 words. Around the length of this blog post so far. Is this a lot, a little? A major problem with this analysis is evaluating the EU's media exposure relative to other, single subjects.
Outside of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and a choice few other newspapers, the EU most likely only makes a short appearance in the very small international news section of local newspapers. This is because the top five newspapers contributed most articles with higher word counts, driving the average up. How little substantial coverage is, is best illustrated through the relevance score. Only 10 percent of the articles contained the EU as a major reference as determined by LexisNexis, indicating that most articles referenced the EU only in passing, with the bulk of the article pertaining to another organization, subject, person, or other identifier.
A total of 450 blogs were counted for May giving an average of 15 per day. Being that anyone can start a blog, and their recent explosion this number seems too low. LexisNexis trolls 4,539 different blogs through a source called Newstex. This is higher than the number of newspapers in the U.S., so total results should still be higher if the EU was receiving a proportional amount of coverage in the blogosphere as it was in newspapers. Unlike newspapers, the top three blogs made up only 15 percent of the 450. The median word count was 458, about 100 words shorter than newspapers and only 8 percent contained the EU as a major reference. These results indicate that the EU receives even less coverage in the blogosphere than it does through newspapers.
And how does the EU bode on television? Again this is hard to evaluate relative to other subjects. There were a total of 56 news broadcasts over the course of May that mentioned the EU. This however does seem low, and is also the conclusion in a similar study conducted on media exposure in 2004 by Lynda Kaid and Andrew Willliams entitled “Framing the New EU: U.S. Media Portrayals of the 2044 European Union Expansion and Parliamentary Elections,” because many of the sources, such as CNN, are active 24 hours a day. Word count could not be determined because of such high variance in the data for the transcripts. There was a slight increase, 14 percent, in major references of the EU compared to newspapers and blogs.
Ultimately these quantitative results can say that the EU receives a small amount of media exposure relative to the total amount of media we are exposed to each day. On a per subject relative basis this is harder to determine. Does the EU receive more exposure than Russia? Brazil? Does the EU receive more exposure than Brangelina? Most likely not. The question now becomes a normative one: should the EU receive more media exposure than it currently does in the U.S.? I believe the answer is yes. The EU does not receive enough media exposure relative to its importance as a global actor.
More to come examining the subjects of the media gathered...
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