Europe Can't Get Its Stories Straight

The European Union can act in unison at times -- for example, on Russia sanctions or, at least so far, on Brexit. But as French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel try for a closer union in the next few years, they will need to be mindful of the fact that there is no single narrative among the publics in different European countries on matters of economic importance.

A recent paper for Bruegel, a Brussels-based think tank, vividly shows this by analyzing coverage of Europe's recent financial crisis by four important centrist newspapers: Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung, France's Le Monde, Italy's La Stampa and Spain's El Pais. The total data set encompassed 51,714 news stories. The researchers -- Henrik Mueller and Gerret von Nordheim from Dortmund University and Bruegel's Giuseppe Porcaro -- fed them to a content analysis algorithm and then analyzed the results to construct generalized narratives. Their focus was on how blame for the crisis was attributed.