A lively public debate is of great importance when far-reaching changes are carried through, both during the decision-making process and during the implementation. Newspapers, television, radio and nowadays the Internet too, all are supposed to voice the various sentiments and points of view that circulate in society. If the media do not function well, it becomes difficult to asses to what extent a new policy is in agreement with the views of the people and whether it has enough public support. It is much easier, however, to sing the praises of the media in general terms than to determine whether those media are in actual practice living up to their promise. Things become even more difficult when European affairs are involved, since both the public debate and the media are then disintegrated by national and linguistic borders.
Euro
In the book Democratization, Europeanization and Globalization Trends, two attempts are made to evaluate the performance of the media with regard to one of the most far-reaching European changes in the past few years: the merging of more than ten national currencies into the Euro. In ‘The Press Reporting of European Economic and Monetary Union in Four European Countries: A Comparative Analysis’ (pages 361-378), Marianne Law, Jerry Palmer and David Middleton draw a general comparison between media within and without the Eurozone. Christ’l De Landtsheer and Elisabeth Koch focus specifically on the use of metaphors in ‘Metaphors and the Framing of the European Single Currency (the Euro) In and Out of Euroland’ (pages 429-446).
Press reporting
According to Marianne Law, Jerry Palmer and David Middleton, it is almost frightening to what extent the media determine which topics dominate the public debate. It is much less clear, they say, to what extent the media determine the results of that debate too. Do people believe A, because their newspaper has prompted them to? Or does a newspaper argue for A, because its readers would otherwise abandon it for another newspaper? However that may be, there are significant differences between the media from within the Eurozone (France, Germany, the Netherlands) and those from without it (Great Britain). In Great Britain, the introduction of the Euro was equally often approached from a political perspective as from an economic perspective. Within the Eurozone, there was much less attention for political aspects of the matter. Although there was considerable opposition to the Euro under the surface, as would become apparent later, the media deemed it more important at the time to highlight the practical economic consequences of the Euro than to address the fundamental question whether its introduction was a good idea or not. The question seems justified whether the public debate could not have been served better by the media.
Metaphors
Metaphors prove to be a slippery topic in the hands of Christ’l De Landtsheer and Elisabeth Koch. I am quite willing to believe that metaphors determine to a great extent the emotional impact of news coverage. It is far from simple, however, to spell out the actual process in a scientifically correct manner, especially when trying to draw a comparison between newspapers in seven different languages. In their attempt to live up to the usual scientific standards, the authors make ample use of statistics. This results in conclusions such as that the frequency and intensity of the metaphors inside the European Monetary Union were higher than outside the EMU, ‘although content power was lower than in the non-Euro countries.’ This sounds impressive enough, but it remains unclear what this high content power outside of the Eurozone might actually imply. Nevertheless it is amusing to know that the Euro ‘was waiting for a goal to set the scores even,’ according to the Greek newspaper Eleftherotypia and that the Spanish newspaper El Pais believed that ‘if we cook it [the Euro] with a little mimo, everything will taste as delicious as ever,’ only to grow worried about ‘the boiling of the markets’ a few weeks later.
Krijn Peter Hesselink, Instituut voor Publiek en Politiek, Amsterdam
Russell F. Farnen, Henk Dekker, Christ’l De Landtsheer, Heinz Sünker and Daniel B. German (eds.), Democratization, Europeanization and Globalization Trends (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005)