Tale Never Loses in the Telling Media Narratives in Portugal Spain and Ireland

The last decades have been marked by a shift on European Union’s paradigm: the “permissive consensus” has been replaced by a “constraining dissensus, bringing to academic debate the relevance of a European public sphere capable of defeating the so-called communication deficit between EU and its citizens. In 2009, the Eurozone crisis had hastened this process, and European issues have become more salient and contested. Resorting to Habermas’ classic conceptualisation of public sphere, the democratic deficit only can be overcome if European topics were discussed and reported in the various media among Europe at the same time, with the same level of attention and framed in a similar way across national media. This paper explores the narratives on economic news in Portugal and Spain, three European countries that faced a bailout and harsh austerity measures imposed by the so-called TROIKA. As a result, the national governments were partially dismissed of their responsibilities and the EU institutions have taken some leverage on national economic policies. However, the recent literature on European narratives argues that the media coverage domesticated the Eurozone crisis not going beyond the national frames. Besides, the research on economic news states that domestication is a crucial feature of mainstreamed economic news. To address our puzzle an in-depth content analysis of all economic news published in the four major mainstream newspapers in Portugal Spain and Ireland was carried out. Through the analysis of more than 6000 economic articles we introduce a new typology capable of measure the similarity on narratives by combining three dimensions: media attention, tone and framing, particularly looking into five dominant frames (Problem, Cause, Responsibility, Consequences and Solution). The period selected is the electoral campaign to 14 national elections before (2002-2009) and after the onset of the Eurozone crisis (2010-2016). The objectives are two. Firstly, assess if the way the Portuguese, Spanish and Irish newspapers portrayed the European economic news is convergent and if somehow changed with the economic crisis; secondly, explore the responsibility frame - domestication vs supranalization- as well as the accountable actors. In-depth analysis at the responsibility level is especially relevant in Eurozone crisis context given that a multilevel governance structure as EU had taken an explicit control over the national economy.