Jessica Bain

En‘vision’ing Europe's crisis: Intertextuality in news coverage of the Eurozone crisis in Chinese, Indian and Russian press

Abstract European political communication studies are marked by a lack of attention to the visual. Yet there is a need to go beyond strictly textual analyses towards an understanding that visual images also play an important role in constructing a European Union (EU) identity both within and outside the Unions borders. This analysis explores the relationship between visual and textual imagery of the EU in international news discourses; a comprehensive intertextual approach which remains an under-researched perspective in studies of visual imagery in general. The study focuses on the intertextual imagery of the EU and its economic crisis in three ‘emerging’ powers; China, India and Russia. The three states are among the main poles in a multi-polar world – an emerging order characterized by power shifts and increased interdependence. In this new global design, the ‘emerging’ powers compete with the EU and USA, and contemplate their own responses to the EUs economic crisis, as well as calculate its effects. This study explores those responses as presented in the leading business papers of each country and asks how the relationship between the visual and textual imagery of the EU contributes to raising visibility and creating cognitive and emotional responses to its on-going crisis.

‘Frenemies'? Images of the US‐EU relations in Asia‐Pacific media

Abstract In a globalising world, foreign places and events cease being remote and irrelevant and, in this sense, ‘move closer’ to home. National news media play an important role in this process. This paper is a case study of how national print media frame international actors and the interactions between them. More specifically, the paper investigates how the media discourses of two Australasian countries (Australia and New Zealand) frame interactions between two leading world powers — the United States and the European Union. Though the official positions of Australia and New Zealand towards the EU and the USA are almost diametrically opposed, news producers in both countries employ similar creative and ‘sticky’ imagery of EU‐US interactions. This paper illustrates how the integration of this imagery results in a complex framing of EU‐US relations by the third party (Australasian print media) in terms of a blended concept, “Frenemies”. Arguably, while constructing the meaning of complex political concepts, news media discourses trigger the blending mechanism ofbackstage cognition. The presented paper studied this mechanism within the framework of conceptual integration theory developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner.

Framing the EU in a Time of Crisis: Media Reflections from EU Strategic Partners in Asia-Pacific

In 2014, global competition for the role of’ superpower’ continues unabated. While the 20th century was widely held to be the ‘American century’, since the global financial crisis, the world has been characterized more by fractures than by hegemonic fixtures. The dust has not yet settled from this period of dramatic geopolitical shifting and ‘the emerging landscape is one in which power is diffusing and politics diversifying’ (Kupchan, 2012, p. 3). Some claim that there will be no single, dominant leader in the next phase of world politics: the 21st century, Kupchan claims, ‘will belong to no one’ (Kupchan, 2012, p. 3). Yet the struggle for global leadership continues. As the most regionally integrated body in world politics, the European Union (EU) has long sought to claim this mantle. Its Lisbon Treaty of 2009 was aimed at enhancing its global role, moving it closer to becoming a legitimate global political heavyweight — a counterbalance to its global economic might. Economics, however, have proved to be the EU’s Achilles’ heel. Since 2008 the EU has become embroiled in an ever-growing debt crisis, with member states’ economies collapsing and public outcry at austerity measures spreading. In this context it is pertinent to ask what impact the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis has had on worldwide perceptions of the EU’s leadership and its relevance globally. In the midst of the Eurozone crisis, is the EU seen by other global powers as an equal, or a ‘global pigmy, but local giant’?

Euro-Visions: An Analysis of Visual Imagery in TV News

As this volume moves from data measurement to data interpretation, this chapter tackles one of the most controversial ways of deciphering messages through the interpretation of visual imagery. As founding members of the transnational comparative research project The European Union through the Eyes of Asia-Pacific,1 we are interested in the methodological challenges involved in tracing the European Union’s (EU’s) images in local media discourses, amongst the general public, and amongst business, political, civil society, and media elites across 19 Asia-Pacific locations.2 In embarking on this project, our team was tasked with designing a suitable model for analysing the EU’s visual imagery on TV news broadcasts outside the EU’s borders, a task that was, at times, fraught with difficulties. This chapter will explore the specific challenges and choices that our collaborative effort encountered while attempting to study the meanings of the EU that were visually created and disseminated through national prime-time TV news bulletins in the Asia-Pacific.

A Mediator on the World Stage? - How the EU's Commitment in Foreign Affairs is Portrayed by New Zealand and Australian Media

European identity is as much a contested concept as is the role of the European Union in foreign affairs. This article combines the two concepts and introduces a third variable, the Other, in order to address the following questions: How do non-Europeans perceive the EU on the world stage? Is a tentative identity as a mediator in foreign affairs conveyed in the EUs conduct of foreign policy? Analysing 10 newspapers, 4 television bulletins, and 830 public surveys from Australia and New Zealand in the first half of 2004, this article argues that the EUs efforts to further democracy and peace are often marginalised in Australian and New Zealand perceptions. Nevertheless, subtle traces of perceptions of the EU as a potent global actor promoting human rights and environmental sustainability and challenging unilateral US policy courses were detected.