Our research has a series of goals: to provide a systematic mass media content analysis and offer insight into how the press in different national contexts prioritises and frames different EU topics; to look at the variance of media coverage of EU relevant issues in relation to the nature of the issue, the national context and media outlets; and to test the possibilities and limits of automated text analysis for a large corpus, across multiple languages.

In substantive terms, our research is driven by theoretical questions regarding news coverage of political issues, their variance and determinants, as well as by the need to serve the general goal of the EUEngage project of understanding the relationship between public opinion and national and supranational political elites, including mass media, in response to the current tensions between the EU governance and the national level questioning of EU driven policies and EU legitimacy.

This research report presents the descriptive findings regarding variance in media coverage of the four core EUENGAGE issue domains (Brexit, economy, immigration and security) based on the corpus of 114,795 articles (from an initial sample of 121,169), from 30 media outlets in 10 countries, for the period January 1, 2016 – October 31, 2016, which our WP had collected.