Dissensus and the Media: The Inconsistent Framings of Spyware Scandals in Poland, Spain, and Greece

Dissensus, the core concept of our research consortium, refers to multifaceted conflicts over the norms, practices, and institutions of liberal democracy. Various legal, political, and social actors can be involved, both at the national level of European member states and at the transnational level of the European Union. As the expansive literature on ‘democratic backsliding’ and the rule of law ‘crisis’ testifies, the existing research tends to focus either on domestic legal and political actors of dissensus or their counterparts enmeshed in the Eurocratic field. Far less attention has been paid, in comparison, to other social actors who exert ideological and symbolic effects on the dynamics of dissensus in these contexts, such as think tanks, academics, non-governmental organisations, and the media. This paper approaches the role of media actors in dissensus from the perspective of framing theory, and tries to analyse how the framings of media organisations affect the dynamics of dissensus. More specifically, it focuses on the distinct if not inconsistent frame articulations and elaborations of similar issues by a range of media actors in proximate contexts. To this end, it conducts a comparative case study of the media portrayals of spyware scandals in Poland (December, 2021), Spain (April, 2022), and Greece (June, 2022). Using the method of qualitative text analysis, it looks at the variations in framing between influential media organisations at the European level (i.e. Politico, Financial Times, Reuters). Unsurprisingly, media actors affect the character of dissensus through their own framings of the relevant issues or events. However, media organisations also impact other aspects of dissensus through the variable framing gaps that form around issues and events, which the cross-comparison of these three cases reveal.