Europe’s Broadcast Views

Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, Vol. 9, No. 4, October 2004

The European media have long been obsessed with the United States. The increased coverage of America in the European press after World War II did not take the form of objective reporting, but as an American trope employed to help define European national identities. This agenda quietly underpinned news coverage for decades. Then, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the Bush administration’s subsequent declaration of the war on terror gave it a new and rancorous life.

Any analysis of the European media’s effect on public opinion that neglects to account for this anti-American worldview only scratches the surface. One recent example is a study of the European Union’s (EU) representation in national television news by University of Amsterdam professors Jochen Peter and Claes H. de Vreese, published in the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics. In a painstakingly technical assessment of content in the national television systems of Britain, Denmark, France, Holland, and Germany, Peter and de Vreese find scant coverage of the EU or its officials, defying the purported "Europeanization" of continental television news.

The study confirms some well-acknowledged traits of television news, such as the higher priority given to war or conflict in the production of the news. But the authors miss an important opportunity to ask whether cultural attitudes toward the United States, in turn, affect cultural attitudes toward the EU. An objective look would find that these attitudes are often defined in relation to one another. Modern European media — especially national television networks — present the EU as a reassuring counterforce against the United States. Good power (the EU) only exists in contrast to ominous power (the United States), rather than as an identity in its own right.

This tendency is especially pronounced in European public television, which has a stronger role in shaping public opinion than public television in the United States. Drawing on considerable government funds and a legacy of state-supported expression, European public television gives citizens an unabashedly ideological outlook that remains influential, despite the expansion of commercial and independent television across the continent.

Although Peter and de Vreese acknowledge public television’s important role, they fail to contrast its coverage of the EU with that of the United States and the world. They also inadequately explore the concept of "invisible power" in explaining the absence of EU officials from the TV screen. Accustomed to strong governmental involvement, European media rarely probe the institutional growth and power of the EU, resulting in impersonal and faceless coverage of EU institutions. This "invisible power" also shapes coverage of the United States: Whereas EU actions are generally framed as rational and benign, American power is portrayed as guided by savage individualism, Darwinian capitalism, arrested cultural development, and raw military force.

The study’s flaws are likely caused by the authors’ use of survey data from 2000, rendered obsolete by September 11. The world-altering events catalyzed by that day shaped citizens’ perceptions of the EU as much as it did their view of America. A true sampling of the post-9/11 public sphere could help, but only if the authors shed their pre-9/11 outlook.

The real story of the contemporary European media is not, as the study would suggest, its tepid coverage of the EU. It is how European public television, by dramatizing the sharp contrasts between the EU and the United States, has portrayed them as inimical and irreconcilable forces. More broadly, it is a story of how the ripped fragments from the trans-Atlantic rupture are defining public opinion along separate, often contradictory directions, to the certain disadvantage of their citizens — and history.