ABSTRACT
The relationship between European Union (EU) institutions and the media can be defined as awkward at best: Once associated almost exclusively with countries that are typically referred to as ‘Eurosceptic’, like the United Kingdom (UK) and Denmark, media Euroscepticism – along with political-party and public-opinion Euroscepticism – is now prominent across most EU member states (Stokes 2016); so much so that the phenomenon prompted the pro-EU think-tank ‘The European Council of Foreign Relations’ to liken the spread of Euroscepticism across the continent to that of a virus (Torreblanca et al. 2013). Increasingly, national media reserve the most critical of treatments not only for specific EU policies, but also for the EU institutions themselves (de Wilde et al. 2013; Lloyd and Marconi 2014). It is not uncommon for news media to portray the European Commission as a faceless, corrupt bureaucracy that consumes vast amounts of taxpayers' money to produce a virtually endless string of pointless regulations. 1 Similarly, the European Council rules in an opaque, unfair manner, where the levels of intrigue, back-stabbing and plotting are often compared to those in ancient and medieval imperial courts of Europe. Such critique is also extended to the European Parliament (EP), which is frequently depicted as an ineffective, resource-wasting institution not only by dedicated Eurosceptic media but also by elite, international media that are considered to be pro-EU. 2
