Blickwinkel auf die EU: kontrastierung deutscher und spanischer pressekommentare zu europapolitischen themen

Abstract

Der gemeinsame europäische Kommunikationsraum wird gelegentlich als unterentwickelt bezeichnet. Diese Arbeit untersucht anhand von deutschen und spanischen Pressekommentaren einen Ausschnitt desselben und stellt fest, dass sich diese bei ihrer Themenwahl hauptsächlich an landesspezifischen Interessengebieten orientieren, die geäußerten Meinungen jedoch in beiden Ländern gemäß der politischen Ausprägung der Tageszeitungen variieren.Despite the progressive political and economical integration process of the European/nUnion, the European public sphere has often been observed to be underdeveloped. The/nobjective of this paper is to give a general insight into media attention and public/nopinion on European politics in Spain and Germany in the weeks before the election of/nthe European Parliament in 2014 by means of a contrastive analysis of editorials and/nopinion pieces published in two influential newspapers of either countries (Süddeutsche/nZeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, El País and El Mundo). The central questions/nto be addressed are how closely and from what perspective European politics are/ncommented on in the different newspapers (1) and whether the national perspective or/nthe ideological orientation are more influential in the newspapers opinion making (2)./nFor this purpose the last three weeks before the election of the European Parliament/nwere searched for editorials and opinion pieces on European politics and relevant/narticles were collected into corpora. Those were used for a contrastive analysis which/ncould show that the attention paid to European concerns in the national newspapers/ndepended largely on their importance for the national audience. Thus national concerns/nwere decisive in the choice of the topics, the ideological orientation was observed to be/nmore influential in the position of each of the publications on those concerns. Although/nthe analyzed newspapers expressed similar views on the EU foreign policy and EU/ninstitutions, stronger divergences could be observed in the area of economic and/nmonetary politics.