The Mediated Politics of Europe

In this introductory chapter, Ekström and Firmstone introduce the overall aim of the book and the theoretical and methodological approach. The approach to political communication is distinctive in three ways. First, we take a contextual approach, analysing the political communication in relation to the tensions and disruptions shaping European politics at a particular moment in time. Second, the book focuses on the performative and discursive dimensions of political communication. An interdisciplinary discourse analytical approach is developed to analyse how the roles and relationships between citizens, politicians and journalists are performed and represented in the media. Finally, we develop a systematic qualitative comparative approach for the cross-national analysis of political discourse. The contribution of the book is discussed in relation to previous research on political communication and media coverage of European Elections. The countries included in the study (France, Greece, Italy, Sweden, UK) are introduced with respect to their historical relationship with the EU, the effects of the economic crisis, the development of Euroscepticism, and the electoral success of mainstream and populist parties.

Coleman’s chapter sets the context for the rest of the book by setting out how two radically different narratives were forced to compete with one another for credibility in the 2014 European parliamentary election. On the one hand, both politicians and journalists adhered to a conventional narrative of the election as a predictable event in the cycle of emergent and irresistible transnational democracy. On the other hand, the election became a focus for popular scepticism towards ‘politics as usual’, the elite defenders of which were deemed incapable of addressing the profound social challenges emanating from politico-economic turbulence of the years that preceded it. Coleman explores this moment of narrative volatility through a detailed analysis of the BBC election-night results’ programme in the United Kingdom and a more comparative account of responses emerging in the hours and days after the election from elite actors in the other countries considered within this volume.

Patrona and Thornborrow examine the discursive constructions of crisis on television evening news and current affairs programmes during the EU Parliament elections of 2014. They focus on the economic crisis referred to as ‘austerity’, and the political crisis caused by the rise of populist parties and agendas in member states. Adopting a discourse and conversation analytic approach, Patrona and Thornborrow examine how the tensions at work across Europe during the 2014 elections were discursively constructed in national news narratives and in mediated debate through diverse representations of crisis. These situated constructions of crisis variously framed the stakes of the elections with respect to the attribution of responsibility and blame in different national contexts, and also helped to legitimize, or, conversely, to downgrade, the European project.

Thornborrow and Haarman examine the main generic and structural differences and similarities of television news reporting on the 2014 European elections, with special attention to France, Italy and the UK. Adopting a qualitative discourse analytic approach and focusing principally on how news items are framed, the authors describe and compare the reports in terms of the formats, semiotic features, and discursive practices characteristic of the television news styles of the national broadcasters. Analysis of both verbal and visual levels offers key perspectives on explicit and implicit ‘messages’ underlying the news and highlights recurring national patterns. Thornborrow and Haarman argue that such consistent stylistic and technological choices reflect cultural presuppositions which are drawn upon in the national construction of perspectives and attitudes on Europe—a construct which is then represented in television news in a peculiarly national style.

Ekström and Tolson focus on how the credibility of politicians and the professional norms of journalists are discursively negotiated in adversarial interviewing in election campaigns. The comparative analysis includes styles of interviewing in news and current affairs programs in the UK, Sweden, France, Greece and Italy. Conversation analysis is used to explore how journalists push the boundaries of impartiality in question formats, footings and sequences of questioning. Interviews in which politicians’ credibility was seriously challenged occurred in all countries. However significantly more aggressive and face-threatening questioning, than the typical accountability interviewing, occurred in three contexts: in forms of live interviewing performed by celebrity journalists; in specific program formats such as political talk shows; and in interviews with politicians whose views are positioned as deviant and outside the political mainstream.

Tolson and Thornborrow present a case study of news reporting from other EU member states, where national journalists are located as ‘field reporters’. The study compares journalistic practices prevalent in France and in the UK taking the news programmes TFI ‘J20H’ and Channel 4 News as examples. The French material consists of two contrasting items, one from the UK about the Eurosceptic party UKIP, and the second from Poland about the popularity of the EU in that country. By comparison the Channel 4 report, from Copenhagen, is constructed in a very different journalistic style. The reporter, Matt Frei, is constantly on camera, taking the viewer on a journey to investigate the Danish People’s Party (DPP); assuming a distance between the viewer and a different EU country that becomes, to some extent, a kind of cultural travelogue.

Firmstone and Corner comparatively analyse how the public are represented in television news about elections in France, Italy, Greece, Sweden and the UK. The chapter focuses on examining the instances of the indirect voice of the public, the way that the public are ‘spoken for’ in their absence either in the reporting of opinion polls or in the claimed hearing of the ‘voice of the public’ through the interpretation of election results. Patterns in journalists’ practices show that opinion polls were predominantly used in the creation of predictive and evaluative narratives and were used more often to say something about politicians and national politics than to report on public opinion. The second part of  the chapter looks at how the election results were reported, and how journalists made politicians’ ‘hearing’ of  ‘the messages’ sent by the public in the form of the election results a key feature of their story-telling, which further served to ventriloquize citizens’ voices.

Ekström and Andrew Tolson investigate how citizen’s voices are constructed and contextualized in news media across Europe. Interviews and vox pops are analyzed with respect to citizen roles, identities, attitudes, entitlement, epistemic status, and relationships to politicians. The vox pop constitutes a distinct format of news production although it is expanded into hybrid forms. It was frequent in the news in Sweden, France and the UK and almost nonexistent in Greece and Italy. Citizens are typically represented in a problematic relationship to politicians and are primarily used to illustrate categories of opinions, identities and attitudes. There is a tendency to trivialize citizens’ knowledge and engagement in politics. The few instances where citizens and politicians talk to each other confirm the rift between them. Some vox pops illustrate a shift from the voice of the concerned citizen to expressions of populist apathy and an implicitly patronising portrayal of political ignorance.

In this chapter Patrona explores citizens’ discursive participation in political current affairs programs during the EU elections of May 2014. The study focuses on a Greek audience discussion program and compares it with similar programs from the UK and France. By applying discourse analysis and conversation analysis of citizen contributions in sequences of TV talk, the study aims at locating citizen contributions on an imagined ‘broadcast spectrum’ of interactional positions from which ordinary citizens have a voice in media talk across Europe. Moreover, it uncovers the differences in the communicative entitlements of ordinary people between the Greek program and the programs from the UK and France, and addresses the implications of these differences for the processes of public dialogue, democratic participation, and the legitimation - or otherwise - of citizen voices.

In the chapter Coleman and Firmstone’s multimodal discourse analysis captures both the visual characteristics and the spoken discourse of the performances of mainstream politicians in television news in five countries (France, Italy, Greece, Sweden and the UK). Examples are used to illustrate the performative frames and discursive strategies that mainstream politicians employ in order to establish themselves as serious and authoritative personae, while at the same time attempting to realize qualities of authenticity and public representativeness. In order to appear popular rather than populist, mainstream politicians are driven to produce hybrid performances that enable them to realise a delicate balance between authority and authenticity. The chapter suggests that political performances are played out within a spectrum, with an ideal type of perfectly self-controlled mainstream imagery at one end and populist appeals to be ‘one of the people’ and to understand ‘ordinary people’ at the other. The analysis also explores the discursive strategies of journalists in constructing mainstream politicians and questions journalists’ roles in the construction (and deconstruction) of politicians as mainstream in the genre of interactive news making.

The 2014 European Parliament elections defined a key ‘moment in time’ in European politics, a moment in time marked principally by the rise of right-wing populist parties. In this chapter, Ekström and Morton analyse the mediated performances of populist leaders to ask two questions. Firstly, what constitutes the performances and the appeal to the people articulated in television news and current affairs across countries? Secondly, how has television news journalism responded to the challenges of reporting on an increasingly prominent political populism? The study shows general features of populist discourse, rhetorical strategies and claims of exclusively representing ‘the people’. It also presents significant differences in the embodied styles of individual politicians and how the performed cultural identities of the populist politicians resonate myths and stereotypes in the specific national contexts. Finally, the comparative analyses demonstrate the ambivalence of a journalism exposing populist politicians for extraordinary critical interrogations and providing favourable environments for the performances of populism.

In this concluding chapter, Ekström and Firmstone reflect on the findings of individual chapters to consider the overall consequences for the five key questions explored by the study: 1) How are tensions and disruptions in European politics discursively constructed and negotiated in broadcast media across countries? 2) How is politics represented and communicated through different journalistic practices and media discourse; genres, styles and narratives of reporting, forms of interviewing, etc.? 3) How are citizens represented, talked about, talked to, and invited to participate with their own voices in the media? 4) What constitutes the mediated performances of mainstream and populist political leaders, and how do politicians meet the various challenges of political communication at the particular moment in time? 5) How are the relationships between journalists, politicians and citizens discursively constructed and negotiated in television news and current affairs across countries? The chapter concludes by presenting the benefits of the comparative approach to qualitative discourse analysis of political communication developed by the authors and suggesting directions for future research.