Research Papers

Throughout the years Britain has been considered to be the home of Euroscepticism. Such attitudes are rooted in the British political culture, media system, public opinion and the longstanding tradition of viewing the European continent as the other. This article surveys the way the British media has presented the foreign policy of the European Union. Through a mix of quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis of sources from the print media it finds that Euroscepticism is almost inexistent throughout the British media. The analysis employs a framework that focuses on four key aspects of journalistic writing: the style of reporting - whether journalists assume any normative position or merely choose to remain neutral, the actors whose voice’s are represented, the range of frames constructed and presented, and the way in which the European Union was linked to main topic of the article. The covered papers are Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times, The Independent, The Mirror and The Sun with all their associated Sunday papers. Two case studies are chosen in order to reflect two very distinctive areas of EU foreign policy: global climate change policy and policy towards Russia.