Reflecting the Public Interest? How European News Media Cover Public Opinion Cues on EU Legislative Politics

Policymakers intensively rely on the news media as information sources to learn about public opinion preferences. Especially in the European Union, characterized by its remote and opaque policymaking processes, the news media have been said to provide an important link between citizens and policymakers. However, media outlets have their own organizational objectives, practices and routines. Also the actors that appear in the news as sources have their own strategic purposes to express information about public opinion in the news. It is therefore likely that some bias exists in the media portrayal of public opinion on which policymakers so intensively rely. This paper assesses under which conditions and how information about public opinion connected to EU legislative procedures is covered in European news media. Can we identify genuine public opinion preferences or is media coverage rather biased towards the political and organizational objectives of media outlets and other political actors? The analysis is based on a large scale content analysis conducted in the context of the INTEREURO project (www.intereuro.eu). The dataset consists of 4.500 media statements in six European media outlets on a random sample of 125 legislative proposals adopted by the European Commission between 2008-2010. Some preliminary results suggests that the coverage of public opinion cues is strongly concentrated around a small set of the sampled policy proposals. For the lion-share of policy proposals, no or only a few public opinion cues are prevalent in the news. Moreover, it seems that the coverage of public opinion is not so much driven by news values, but rather by strategic objectives of political actors that appear as sources in media articles.