Transnational Media – Transnational Actors and Issues? How Transnational Media Outlets Report about the European Parliament Election

The electoral campaign for the European Parliament (EP) in 2019 takes place at a time of deep discontent and constraining dissensus. The partisan conflicts about the future of the EU have shaken up the party system and cleavage structure in many European member states. This politicisation of Europe has increased the visibility and relevance of European politics in media debates. Previous analyses on the media coverage of electoral campaigns for the EP focused on national media. They show that the electoral campaigns predominantly focus on national issues and domestic actors. However, it is still unclear how transnational media report about the electoral campaigns to the EP. Hence, the present study shifts the perspective and analyses the news coverage of transnational media during the electoral campaign to the EP elections in 2019. To what extent are policy issues during the electoral campaign framed in a national or transnational manner and which domestic and European actors are most often featured in the transnational media outlets? Following Brüggemann/Schulz-Forberg’s typology of transnational media, the Financial Times as global media outlet, the Deutsche Welle as national media with a transnational mission and Politico as pan European media website are selected. These three sources have a large international readership and European-wide circulation. Selecting the website of Politico considers the increasing role of international digital news for the EP election campaign. The articles are selected by using a keyword search at the database Factiva and then coded with the political claims analysis. Afterwards, the discourse network methodology is deployed. This is an innovative approach to combine actor-centred and content-oriented approaches to discourses from a social network perspective and allows studying the co-occurrence of actors and frames in a relational perspective. Hence, analysing post-national media outlets gives new insights into whether transnational media frame the electoral campaigns in a transnational manner as well as how visible different types of actors and the coverage of issues are during the electoral campaign in 2019.