Britain and the EU Constitution

This book tries to measure the extent to which the attitude of the British towards the EU Constitution was influenced by the British printed media. This is done via studying the British press coverage of the issue from 2002 to 2005. The study relies on a corpus of articles from five British national newspapers: two tabloids (Sun & Daily Mirror), two upper market (Guardian & Daily Telegraph), and one middle market (Daily Mail). The study has opted for two theories of media and communication effects: Agenda Setting and Framing in order to methodologically handle the extracted articles. Through the Agenda Setting Theory, the potential transfer of issue salience and attributes from the press to the public is quantitatively and qualitatively studied. The potential correlation between issue salience/attributes and selected opinion polls is measured. Through the Framing Theory, the types of frames in the news stories are detected based on an extended version of Semetko & Valkenburg’s (2000) checklist of frame detection and the textual and rhetorical devices with which the frames have been encapsulated are deciphered. This book targets Media & Communication and public opinion researchers.