Reporting from 'The Bubble'. Metaphors of EU by Brussels Journalists

More than a thousand of journalists are stationed in ”the capital of Europe“ to provide regular reporting about European affairs. In order to cover the EU, one needs first to make sense of it. This paper looks at the metaphors used by the journalists when speaking about the EU and its communication sphere. It is based on qualitative interviews with some 30 Brussels-based correspondents, complemented by a limited content analysis of media and blog content about correspondence from Brussels. Actions and activities of the European Union are the daily bread of Brussels correspondents. During their job, they come in touch with both material and immaterial aspects of the EU. People, places, norms or institutions they encounter in Brussels make the EU seem more tangible. The EU acquires a higher degree of concreteness in the eyes of the journalists. However, it still remains a „strange object in the making“. To get a better grasp of it, metaphors are often seen as a useful tool, as they enable comparisons with more familiar settings. From an academic point of view, studying metaphors is a powerful means for analysing how is the European Union imagined and discursively constructed. Journalists act as intermediaries between a political sphere and its citizens. They do not only passively transfer messages from one level to another, they also create discourses and contribute to the shaping of a (European) public sphere. The way they see the European Union, its communication and their own job will most probably be reflected in the content they produce. We deliberately limited our interviews to the journalists from the so-called „new member states“(from 2004 onwards). For the moment, they have been largely understudied by the literature and may present some specificities in their ways of discursively constructing the EU through metaphors. To complete the picture, the media content part of the data was collected with no restriction on the country of origin. As this paper shows, several competing conceptualisations of the EU coexist in correspondents‘ discourses. In this variety, one metaphor stands out as largely consensual. It pictures Brussels (and in extension the whole EU decision-making) as a „bubble“. This points at the perceived elitism of the European project, seen as disconnected from its bases.