ABSTRACT
European integration has been largely an economic project, thus news about economic and business issues constitutes an important part of this study. During both monitoring exercises, coverage of economic integration mainly involved news about mergers and Euro oscillations. As the report from Spain emphasises, with reference to previous research,1 economic reality has a high impact on European media discourse. References to economic integration, to the Euro, and to the European budget amount to around 8% of the news analysed in the Spanish media (without taking into account the articles focusing on the economy of the different European countries). This sort of news appears mostly in the business, Wnance, and economy sections of newspapers. The overall importance of economic issues in this study is signiWcantly lower than that noted in previous research. This is due to the wider remit of the project in terms of a wider view of Europe, and also because of the inclusion of a wider variety of types of news including sport and culture. Earlier chapters already outlined the quantitative coverage of topics including economic integration and EMU.
