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A Polarized yet Hollow Debate: The Journalistic Coverage of the Greek Memoranda

By Christos Kostopoulos

The three memoranda signed between various Greek governments and the creditor Troika have been one of the most important European political issues in this decade, generating a lot of journalistic and scholarly interest. This article presents findings from a framing analysis (you can find the complete research here) conducted on three mainstream Greek newspapers (Avgi, Kathimerini, Ta Nea). These frames were compared with the advocate frames promoted through the announcements of the four constant parties in the Greek Parliament throughout this period (PASOK, Nea Dimokratia, SYRIZA, KKE), in order to shed light on the range of democratic debate fostered by the media and the political opinions that were legitimated through their application in the press.

Starting with the first memorandum in 2010 the examination of frames from all three newspapers reveals the range of the debate. The memorandum is discussed mainly in terms of the division between those who are for it and against it, and its good and bad qualities. The framing of the newspapers follows the advocate frames of the two larger parties PASOK and ND, whereas SYRIZA, a marginal party at that point, also manages to be included, because it’s frames fit on the range of legitimate opinions. All the newspapers apply advocate frames by three out of the four major political parties, whereas none of them includes KKE frames. From a market perspective the positions of KKE are not interesting, as lower income workers form it’s main electoral base. Additionally, the examination of the exclusion of the frame from a political and ideological standpoint reveals the limits of the liberal consensus. The analysis of the frames in 2010 reveals that positions that promote a wider criticism of the capitalist mode of production fall outside the acceptable limits of debate. The main frames construct the debate around the issues of efficiency of the measures, their impact, and issues of sovereignty and democracy. The causal attribution dimension revolves around the political game with the parties accusing each other for the crisis, while there is also some blame attributed to the troika. Finally, the solutions discussed concern the future of the memorandum with positions ranging from the necessity of the successful implementation of the program, to its adjustment or complete cancelation. The application of frames is not identical by all newspapers, reflecting a multitude of evaluative positions. Nonetheless, the debate is set around the memorandum without addressing wider reaching topics and alternatives that would question the economic system, which was under a crisis globally. This framing of the debate cuts off the Greek crisis from the global developments and treats it as an issue of management of the system, to be solved by the system itself. Continue reading “A Polarized yet Hollow Debate: The Journalistic Coverage of the Greek Memoranda”

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Spain is no longer exceptional: Mainstream media and the far-right party Vox

By Sergio Olalla, Enrique Chueca and Javier Padilla

For a long time Spain and Portugal have been considered exceptions within the European Union due to the lack of a far-right political party with representation in parliament. However, this situation is no longer the case in Spain due to the recent entrance of Vox in the Andalusian Parliament. Much has been written about Vox’s political nature, its electoral possibilities in the long-term,the reasons behind its upsurgeand how it changes the Spanish political landscape. This article will focus on the way in which the mainstream political media in Spain, El País and El Mundo, treated this party in terms of coverage. After briefly discussing the recent literature on far right and media coverage, we argue that Vox received outstanding media attention considering the scarce percentage of Spaniards who had considered to vote for it. First, we explain the dynamics of media attention to Vox both at the national and Andalusian electoral level and compare it with the voting intention for the party. Second, we compare the media attention received by Vox and a similar party in terms of voting intention and results in previous elections: the Animalist Party Against Mistreatment of Animals (PACMA). Last, we compare the coverage of Vox with the rest of the prominent parties at stake in the Andalusian Regional Election of December 2018. Continue reading “Spain is no longer exceptional: Mainstream media and the far-right party Vox”

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How the General Election 2017 Campaign is Shaping Up on Twitter

By Stefan Bauchowitz and Max Hänska

If we are to believe the pundits, social media has played an outsized role in recent political events, and so it is not surprising that its role in the upcoming General Election has been the subject of much attention. In particular, Labour’s poll surge has at times been attributed to its social media prowess, in spite of its comparatively diminutive war chest.

Using Twitter’s streaming API, we follow election related tweets. Combining our own search and data from Democracy Club, we follow 2119 Twitter accounts of candidates standing in the election (though only 1883 were active). We are also collecting tweets that match a set of election related keywords (e.g. GE2017, votelabour, and others). So far, we have collected around 1.7m tweets involving candidates and a further 8m tweets matching our keywords. Though we are continuing to collect data, it seemed timely to set out some of the clearest trends in advance of the vote.

By volume of tweets, Labour’s presence is far greater than that of other parties (Figure 1). On aggregate, Labour’s network out-tweets that of the Tories by a factor of 3, though the activities are somewhat more level if only the tweets created by prospective parliamentary candidates or their staff are taken into account – Labour candidates tweet 1.8 times as often as Conservatives. Continue reading “How the General Election 2017 Campaign is Shaping Up on Twitter”

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Democracy Between Compromise and Control

By Henry Radice

The slogan ‘take back control’ was widely credited as a key factor in the UK’s vote to leave the EU on June 23rd.  That vote revealed many cleavages in how we understand our democracy. One significant one lies between understandings of democracy as the control of power by the majority, and a more subtle notion of democracy as the art of compromise. This latter understanding appears to be in retreat throughout the liberal democratic parts of the world, to say nothing of more fragile political environments.

2016619_174727The contrast between control and compromise is important, and the lesson it yields sobering. In an ‘interdependent, globalised world’, to recycle the cliché – more-or-less accurate as it happens – the notion of control intervenes as a comforting delusion. It soothes the angst of those who would stop the world in order to get off. But it also appeals to the individual scale, and evokes domestic analogies in which control is seen as something achievable.

Indeed, the use of domestic analogies has become both widespread and problematic in both national and international political discourse. Witness the success in the UK of the frequent comparisons between the UK economy and a putatively overstretched, finite household budget. ‘Taking back control’ evokes a world in which borders can be as solid and straightforward as the walls of a house, where an Englishman’s home is his castle and it is his right to raise the drawbridge when feeling besieged (though he would be wise in such circumstances to have an adequate stock of provisions, or, in other words, a plan…). Continue reading “Democracy Between Compromise and Control”

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Fantastic Mr President: The Hyperrealities of Putin and Trump

By Maria Brock

Vladmir_Putin_fishing_toplessIn July 2016 – more than 15 years into his time in office – Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s approval rating was at 82%, a figure made all the more remarkable by the fact that the country is experiencing a palpable and lengthy economic downturn. Some commentators have favoured an explanation that treats this as proof that a larger-than-life president is more in line with ‘what Russians want’, as Putin “satisfied a yearning for a strong leader who could make the Russian family proud”. However, concretising a Russian ‘national desire’ is less than helpful if we seek to understand the reasons behind Putin’s continued popularity. Equating a historical past with an inherent propensity to follow strong-men is an exercise in oversimplification, as it treats nations and groups as essentially static, prone to repeat the same historical patterns over and over again. Similarly, a focus on the more overt parallels with the earlier ‘Cults of Personality’ neglects the fact that the underlying ‘conditions of possibility’ that produced the two phenomena are different. Such comparisons also fail to explain the appeal of similarly larger-than-life politicians in countries with a longer democratic tradition. Clearly, an emphasis on national psychological propensities is not productive. Instead, an analysis of the appeal of such leader figures that taps into less conscious mechanisms is worthwhile. By simultaneously looking at the phenomenon of Donald Trump’s remarkable rise, a number of parallels pertaining to the creation of their public personae become apparent. In fact, such an analysis can serve to illuminate overarching principles structuring the successful creation of their outsized public personae. Continue reading “Fantastic Mr President: The Hyperrealities of Putin and Trump”

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The myths that are preventing us from solving the refugee crisis

By Zoe Gardner

Refugees on a boat crossing the Mediterranean sea, heading from Turkish coast to the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, 29 January 2016.

The preventable deaths of another 400 people in the Mediterranean on Monday morning must be a wake-­up call. The British and European approach to the migrant and refugee humanitarian crisis simply isn’t working.

For all of the outcry we’ve seen in the past six months over the plight of refugees desperately attempting to cross to Europe, for all of the high-­level summits and meetings between European leaders, and for all of the billions that have been thrown into border control operations, no credible solution has yet been found to prevent the ongoing tragic deaths at sea.

In a smaller version of what is going on in the Mediterranean, we in the UK regularly hear horrific reports of the corpses of migrants and refugees being discovered frozen in refrigerated trucks or suffocated in lorries in Kent. Human beings who may have survived an initial Mediterranean crossing, dying in their attempts to cross to England from their squalid camps in Calais.

So why have the attempted solutions – expensive and politically wrought border control agreements, aimed at saving human lives by preventing and discouraging these dangerous journeys – so comprehensively failed? Continue reading “The myths that are preventing us from solving the refugee crisis”

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The political ‘migration crisis’ and the military-humanitarian response

By Pierluigi Musarò

20151030_Syrians_and_Iraq_refugees_arrive_at_Skala_Sykamias_Lesvos_Greece_2‘We need more than a humanitarian response […] We need political leadership and action,’ Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said on 8 March 2016. Referring to the fact that ‘Europe is now seeing record numbers of refugees, and migrants, arriving on its shores’, Grandi stressed that ‘this emergency does not have to be a crisis, it can be managed’. Grandi, who was speaking to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, did not mention to what extent, in recent years, the militarisation of migration and border controls has been explicitly bound with notions of humanitarianism. Nevertheless, I guess he is aware that the current focus on both the humanitarian and security-related aspects of the phenomenon suggests a more complex logic of threat and benevolence that allows for a security-humanitarian response.

Unfortunately Grandi’s concern is not new. The problematic relationship between humanitarianism and politics was clearly described 17 years ago by James Orbinski of Médecins Sans Frontières, on the occasion of his Nobel Lecture: ‘Humanitarianism is not a tool to end war or to create peace. It is a citizen’s response to political failure. It is an immediate, short term act that cannot erase the long term necessity of political responsibility.’ The novelty is that Orbinski was criticising those interventions called ‘military-humanitarian’, while Grandi is referring to the ongoing migration management, too often framed as a humanitarian emergency.

A quick look at how the moral discourses typically associated with the humanitarian aid organisations are today gaining importance in the context of border control makes clear what types of political and epistemological implications this discursive dislocation has. Consider, for example, the news, images and video produced by the Italian Navy during the operation Mare Nostrum – the military-humanitarian operation in the Mediterranean targeted at both rescuing migrants and arresting smugglers. Let me note that Mare Nostrum (our sea) was the Roman name for the Mediterranean Sea, hijacked by Mussolini to frame fascist propaganda about the ‘Italian lake’. As the same (ambivalent) name indicates, the possessive ‘our’ projects the Mediterranean as a European space of care and control, while it ambiguously refers to both Italy and Europe.

Continue reading “The political ‘migration crisis’ and the military-humanitarian response”

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Read All About It (Or Not): The Trouble with the Turkish Press

By Kate Cyr

Protest_against_2015_Koza_İpek_raid_(1)Istanbul’s 2013 Gezi Park protests unearthed muddy tales of corruption, bias, and authoritarianism that powerful conglomerates and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) would have preferred buried indefinitely. The government received global scrutiny as anyone from students to grandmothers gathered in the streets to demonstrate against the AKP’s increasingly undemocratic actions, including silencing the press.

In the years since, the Syrian crisis, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s strong-handed foreign policy, and religious issues have dominated coverage of Turkey abroad – leaving important issues like press freedom and related human rights violations once again shrouded in silence. Yet the political biases of Turkish media deserve scrutiny by Turkish and international audiences alike. Amidst the crises of the region, misreporting and bias convolutes the information reaching the public and can have very real implications for the understanding and response to various issues. The stories of daily paper Sabah and the press treatment of the Kurdish minority both offer warnings of the damage Turkey’s biased press machinery can cause.

Sabah, a daily newspaper founded in 1985, is telling of the complex and often hidden ways in which press freedom is stifled in Turkey – and just how deeply corporate and government meddling runs in the industry. After displeasing government officials in 2007, the paper was seized over an alleged misfiling of merger and acquisition paperwork six years before. The state sold the daily to a company owned by then-Prime Minister Erdoğan’s son-in-law using state-subsidized funds, allowing the government to effectively control Sabah’s content.

Continue reading “Read All About It (Or Not): The Trouble with the Turkish Press”

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How Europe talks about itself: Lessons from the Euro Crisis

By Robert G. Picard

9781784530600Although the continuing Euro Crisis is currently being overshadowed by the refugee crisis in Europe, its economic and political effects continue to shake the foundation of Europe and dampen national economies.

There are lessons to be learned from the way the Euro Crisis has been portrayed about European institutions, how they responds to crises, and the state of European integration and identity. A new book, The Euro Crisis in the Media: Journalistic Coverage of Economic Crisis and European Institutions, provides those lessons. The book is based on research exploring how the Euro crisis was portrayed in the European press and the implications of that coverage on public understanding of the developments, their causes, the responsibilities for addressing the crisis, the roles and effectiveness of European institutions, and the implications for European integration and identity. These have implications for the ways Europeans talk about Europe and the issues it faces.

The most important findings from the study about the ways the Euro Crisis was portrayed are:

1. It is someone else’s problem

Overall the Euro Crisis has been portrayed as foreign story, rather than a European story or a domestic story. Even in countries with sovereign debt challenges it was portrayed as a foreign story, though partly as a domestic story. The framing of stories in media asserted others as the cause of the crisis and thus shifted the problem to others to solve. It was not talked about as a common problem needing common solutions.

Continue reading “How Europe talks about itself: Lessons from the Euro Crisis”

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Fortress Europe: Cause or Consequence of Europe’s ‘Migrant Crisis’?

By Catherine Briddick

Europe, it seems, is facing a ‘migration crisis’. This crisis is ‘testing’ for, amongst others, the British public, because, as our Prime Minister David Cameron explained in an interview with ITV News:

you have got a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain because Britain has got jobs, it’s got a growing economy, it’s an incredible place to live.

So just who is this ‘swarm’? It is not at all clear, as whilst the BBC reports on Calais’ ‘battles’ with a ‘migrant influx trying to reach UK’, Al Jazeera’s ‘Inside Story’ asks instead whether those who have fled conflict are being undermined by the language used to describe their plight, taking an editorial decision not to refer to those crossing the Mediterranean as ‘migrants’ and using instead the term ‘refugees’.

British_biometric_passportThe migrant vs refugee binary is not the only distinction being drawn in media reporting of Europe’s ‘migrant crisis’. In addition to the traditional differentiation between asylum and migration and the shifting sympathies which accompany it, we have also seen renewed attention being paid to the ‘deserving refugee’ and the ‘bogus asylum-seeker’. Thus at the same time as the Daily Mail urges the Government to grant asylum to ex-military translators and highlights the violence that they and their families experience (and the risks and costs of being ‘smuggled’ to the UK), the newspaper also ‘reveals’ the ‘trafficker’ who is ‘smuggling’ hundreds across the Mediterranean and ‘investigates’ a ‘cabal’ of asylum charities for, amongst other things, holding the Government to account. Continue reading “Fortress Europe: Cause or Consequence of Europe’s ‘Migrant Crisis’?”