ABSTRACT
This chapter puts into question the very existence of properly European media. Firstly, we will discuss the notion of European culture itself, and its implication in relation to the so-called banal Europeanism hypothesis. Based on literature review, subsequently, the prevalence of the vertical over the horizonal Europeanization will be called to action for explaining the latency of a common media culture. On this basis, we will move to a related aspect, the proportion between the top-down and the bottom-up ways to Europeanization: in the first case, by tracing back the history, and the failure, of pan-European media in the last decades; and in the second, by showcasing the results of our analysis of social media debate in ten countries, proving in its turn the weakness and vagueness of a properly European discursive dimension (or, so to speak, of a European public sphere).
