ANALYSING MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF THE EU REGIONAL COHESION POLICY, A MEANING STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS ACROSS SEVEN EU COUNTRIES

In spite of the relevance of EU regional cohesion policy for local business and economic development, little is still known about how its meaning gets socially and linguistically constructed. We propose to extend knowledge in this area by focusing on media representation as a key mechanism of social construction. Empirically, we analyzed the meaning structure of contents produced by newspapers about EU regional cohesion policy in seven EU countries. Our results show that, national variations in media spaces constructing policy implementation can be traced to the extent to which topics characterizing national media spheres: a) display different content; b) occupy different relative positions, c) connect to each other and cluster in larger groups. Also, in a very preliminary way, it is shown how different national media spheres can be put in semantic relation to each other.