Ekaterina Balabanova

Sending and Receiving: The Ethical Framing of Intra-EU Migration in the European Press

Labour migration in the European Union (EU) has become a hot topic in public debates, particularly around the issue of European enlargement. The media are frequently criticized for stirring up debates around immigration but analysis has overlooked the underlying ethical justifications for migration controls. This article addresses this by developing an innovative approach that applies an ethical lens to media coverage of intra-EU migration. It shows how a generally narrow range of communitarian and cosmopolitan arguments are employed by the press in two European countries that occupy very different positions in the migratory system: Bulgaria and the UK. It finds a convergence of communitarian arguments across the case studies, and a significant importation of frames, reversing the roles of sending and receiving country.

Ethics, Politics and Migration: Public Debates on the Free Movement of Romanians and Bulgarians in the UK, 2006–2013

Public debates on immigration have become the subject of much concern, particularly in the UK. This article applies an ethical lens to assess changes in public debates over intra-EU migration in six UK national newspapers during 2006 and 2013. It finds an almost complete dominance of communitarian justifications, mainly based on welfare chauvinism, but a notable increase in security-related arguments and a decrease in economic nationalist ideas. Alternative cosmopolitan arguments about immigration go from rare to virtually absent. The discussion links these shifts to a failure of the UK centre-left to overcome historic difficulties in presenting a coherent narrative on immigration policy.

A system in chaos? Knowledge and sense-making on immigration policy in public debates:

This article shows how press selection and presentation of knowledge and expertise relate to processes of sense-making over contemporary political dilemmas. It develops an approach that combines framing analysis with theoretical insights from the literature on narrative and complexity. It demonstrates the value of this approach through quantitative and qualitative analysis of media coverage of the UK government’s decision-making over access to the labour market for new European Union (EU) citizens in 2006. The findings illuminate the relationship between expertise and complexity, the partisan way in which the media utilize expertise, and how official and non-official sources relate to certainty and uncertainty over policy. The article also contributes to our understanding of how intense media scrutiny can shape public debates on immigration, where ‘moral panics’ are often accompanied by calls for government intervention, and the supposedly rational world of facts and figures is distorted into a ‘numbers game’.

Media power during humanitarian interventions: Is Eastern Europe any different from the West?

The role of the media in foreign policymaking has been the subject of significant academic enquiry, particularly in response to the so-called ‘CNN effect’, but this work has mostly focused on prominent Western nations (particularly the United States). This article enlarges the debate by adding a comparative and post-communist perspective. Taking the Kosovo conflict as a case study, it analyses the role of the media in foreign policy in Bulgaria and Britain. Through the application of Robinson’s policy— media interaction model, the article argues that the Bulgarian press did not have any substantial impact on the government’s position on the Kosovo conflict because it framed its reports in a neutral way. The British press/foreign policy relationship discloses a clear case of media support for governmental policy. The findings raise questions about the validity of certain claims about the media—policy relationship in former socialist countries. The article identifies limitations to models based on Western media systems and suggests that their construction is often based on certain cultural assumptions and hence very much context bound.

A Europe of Rights and Values? Public Debates on Sarkozy's Roma Affair in France, Bulgaria and Romania

This article analyses press coverage between July and October 2010 in three different European Union (EU) member states (France, Romania and Bulgaria) of the French governments expulsion of Roma in 2010. It asks what the international reaction to Frances actions tells us about the way in which Europe is deployed in debates over discrimination, minority rights and freedom of movement in national media. The article finds evidence in national public debates of a Europeanisation of normative discussions, thanks to a willingness by a range of actors to use the EU in an instrumental way for political gain. However, the representation of issues and actors by the press also demonstrates the ways in which the prominence of supposedly European norms, and the framing of the EUs role, can be associated with national political dynamics, both in relation to the political environment and contemporary narratives regarding national identity.

Assisted Reproduction: A Comparative Review of IVF Policies in Two Pro-Natalist Countries

Policies on reproduction have become an increasingly important tool for governments seeking to meet the so-called demographic ‘challenge’ created by the combination of low fertility and lengthening life expectancies. However, the tension between the state and the market in health care is present in all countries around the world due to the scare resources available and the understandable importance of the health issues. The field of assisted reproduction, as part of the health care system, is affected by this tension with both—the state’s and the market’s involvements—carrying important implications. Bulgaria and Israel share the same size of population, are markedly paternalistic and both have strong pro-natalist cultures by which large families are expected. For a range of reasons the two countries contrast sharply, however, in terms of their capacity to intervene in the health system, and also in terms of the political will to act on matters of reproduction. This paper examines how assisted reproduction, as reflected by present policies in both countries, influences women’s welfare and considers whose interests the practices of assisted reproduction in these countries actually serve. By reviewing some of the present data on women’s status in Bulgaria and Israel and assessing both states’ policies and involvement in assisted reproduction this paper helps to identify some of the intended and unintended consequences of assisted reproduction policies in different countries.

A deadly cocktail? The fusion of Europe and immigration in the UK press

ABSTRACT This article asks how the EU is imagined and deployed in different justifications for national restrictions on the free movement of European citizens. It does this by analysing press coverage in the UK, where concerns about the issues of immigration and European integration contributed to a victory for ‘Brexit’ in the 2016 referendum. It develops a novel technique for analysing the political dimension of media debates offering a conceptual map to navigate the confusing fusion of Euroscepticism and anti-immigrationism. Through reference to political theories on immigration controls, and ideas about European integration from EU studies a series of hypothetical roles and functions for the EU are developed. These are then used as a framework to analyse coverage in the UK national media in two crucial time-periods: 2006 and 2013. The article’s findings challenge conventional wisdom that Euroscepticism and anti-immigrationism are (a) closely correlated and (b) map neatly onto existing left-right political preferences. The results show that the left-right dimension was less salient in 2013 than in 2006, the space within which discussions of the EU take place narrowed, and the economic and political aspects of regional integration were increasingly overshadowed by the image of the EU as supranational entity.

Media and foreign policy in central and eastern Europe post 9/11: in from the cold?

Most work on foreign policy and media influence focuses on Western media but the increasing prominence of central and eastern European countries in global politics (as members of the EU and NATO) means that the media—foreign policy relationship in these countries is assuming greater importance. This article addresses this gap by revisiting the question of media influence on foreign policy and the CNN effect debate from a non-US/UK, eastern European perspective, using some evidence from the Iraq War. The author builds on previous work on Kosovo where the media were shown to play a rather small role in foreign policy formation in these countries. However, the US-led invasion of Iraq is notable for the number of post-communist countries getting involved, and the widespread unpopularity of the campaign. This article re-examines the debate in light of the new foreign policy environment and asks to what extent the post-9/11 era has seen a transformation of the media—foreign policy relationship in eastern Europe.

‘The CNN effect’ in Eastern Europe ‐ does it exist?: The representation of the Kosovo conflict in the Bulgarian print media

Abstract This article explores the controversial relationship between media and politics. In particular, it looks at print media reporting of large‐scale conflict and its possible link to foreign policy responses. The article examines the representation of the Kosovo conflict by the Bulgarian print media assessing the media‐policy interaction and testing established Western media‐policy models in a post‐communist context. The conclusions drawn relate first, to the suitability of models developed for the Western media outside of the Western context suggesting that their applicability is most likely specific to certain types of media systems and journalistic cultures. Second, the article argues that in the Bulgarian case, as opposed to the Western media, at this current stage of the post‐communist development of the media (or development of the whole society) they are not able to seriously challenge the government no matter how coherent, strongly held and well articulated, or on the contrary, inconsistent, uncertain and badly presented its policies.

Introduction: Communicating War

This special issue is a collection of articles drawn from the one-day international conference that took place in January 2011 at the University of Liverpool, organized and hosted by the Media and Politics research group based at the Department of Communication and Media, University of Liverpool. The issue brings together work from the fields of media and communication, international relations, political geography, and literary culture, to discuss the ways in which the causes and consequences of war are portrayed across diverse texts, imagery and media platforms; it thus aims to encourage a trans-disciplinary dialogue on the varied depictions of war and conflict. It is our contention that cultural understandings of war require critical analysis of a diversity of media texts, and the contexts of their production. For example, a customary emphasis on Anglo-American national news agendas tends to overlook the role of local and transnational news representations; a traditional logocentricity across academic disciplines is now being challenged by work which explores the visual construction of war narratives in media forms. Similarly, in shifting an empirical focus to media genres ‘beyond the news’, research into popular culture or activist media can investigate how alternative media forms and actors are able to challenge preconceptions of legitimate voices in the ‘storytelling’ of war experiences. The papers in this issue together provide a timely focus on the ways various representations, with their proffered definitions, repetitions and archetypes, become the dominant narratives and images of conflict, or, alternatively, are effectively contested and resisted. They ask: to what extent do representations of warfare sustain or disrupt collective understandings and memories of conflict? How do different voices get heard in debates over war and the management of its consequences? The contributors to this special issue take forward the international research agenda concerning the communication of war, and present interdisciplinary approaches to the subject, balancing strong empirical dimensions with practical and theoretical insights. The articles cover both historical and contemporary cases, and are rooted in strong empirical research conducted both with journal of war & culture studies, Vol. 7 No. 1, February, 2014, 1–4