From Isolation to Integration: Measuring Geographical Diversity in National News Coverage of the European Union

A central aspect of the European Union's (EU) 'democratic deficit' is its detachment from citizens. The Union’s ability to engage citizens not only as members of individual nations but also as European citizens is a crucial condition for increasing its democratic legitimacy and advancing European integration. National news media play an important role in engaging citizens with EU-related matters. By going beyond framing issues solely from their own member state’s perspective and incorporating how these issues impact other member states, the media can contribute to a European public sphere. Cross-border media reporting, therefore, is a prerequisite for fostering genuinely European democratic opinion and will formation. This study examines this condition by analyzing 3,664,911 news articles from 17 media outlets across 8 European member states between 1980 and 2019. Using 'Newsmap,' a semi-supervised machine learning tool for geographical news classification, it develops a novel measure of geographical diversity, specifically capturing EU-related media debates following plenary sessions of the European Parliament. Findings reveal individualized and declining trends in the geographical diversity of national EU news coverage, challenging the vision of a pan-European media debate promoted by European integration efforts.