Articles focusing on the EU and Cohesion Policy were very positive even in Britain during the Brexit vote, an analysis covering multiple news outlets from 2010 to 2017 has found.
Views on the EU and Cohesion Policy were overwhelmingly positive from 2010 to 2017, finds a recent monitoring analysis covering over 20 news outlets and 4400 newspieces. Newspapers such as The Guardian, El Mundo, Wales Online and Bloomsberg all had an overall-positive outlook on the EU.
The tone of the media coverage is an overwhelmingly positive picture overall. You may be surprised about that, or at least I was. We even found out that during and after Brexit, there was an influx of positive stories on Cohesion Policy in the United Kingdom and especially in Wales, said Carlos Mendez, Senior Research Fellow from the European Policies Research Centre at the University of Strathclyde, one of the authors of the study.
The monitoring analysis featured Spain, the United Kingdom, and selected international media. Pieces of news were gathered automatically and then analyzed via sensitive analysis and dictionary comparison. The EU budget was the dominant topic internationally, while the top topic in the UK was Brexit and decision-making irregularities were top in Spain.
This is an important topic to analyze because in many parts of the EU, trust is declining and populism and anti-EU sentiments are rising. There is a new trend of misinformation in general, Sanchez says.
A Big Opportunity for Big Data
The analysis found out that the studied news coverage tended to mirror EU policy objectives and wider political themes. However, territorial differences were vast whereas national news differences were not.
Territory matters: that's the maximum you tend to hear whenever there’s talk about Cohesion Policy. This also applies to the media, both the themes and the tones. And the final implication is that you truly do need territorial news campaigns, and the Commission is doing that, Sanchez says.
I wish to emphasize media monitoring for exploiting big data and doing analysis, as I see a bright future for similar campaigns. Perhaps in the future, we could even use artificial intelligence and machine learning to separate relevant and irrelevant stories and translate them as a whole.
A similar study featuring 10 countries has already been commissioned by the DG REGIO on the visibility of Cohesion Policy in online news, and it’s set to be published by the end of the month. While Sanchez cannot disclose any results on that project as of yet, he sees a lot of potential in text analysis as a whole.
A full 27 countries monitoring analysis could certainly be feasible in the future. I very much hope to do more work on that area soon.
Rasmus Helaniemi (Finland)
