Invisible, vulnerable, terrible: (Young Europeans bracketed out from) the EU-related media agenda
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| Citation | |
| Description | The contribution addresses, first, the representation of prevalent EU-related topics in selected European news media in 2014 and 2015; second, it focuses on the construction of young people in European newspapers, TV products and radio programmes. Its goal is to show which discourses are constructed around the media narrative regarding the EU, and to identify the ways in which young people are included as relevant actors in different issues composing the “European” media narrative. The interpretative and comparative thematic analysis, carried out as part of the CATCH EyoU project, is based on four one-month media samples (May and September 2014, May and September 2015) from Italy, Czech Republic, UK, Germany, Portugal, Sweden and Estonia. The research findings suggest that young people rarely appear as relevant civic or political actors and that there is no trace of an ongoing, articulated and independent media discourse regarding the youth in Europe. At the same time, the findings show that the marginal representation of young people in the "European" narrative constructs them as a vulnerable, problematic and sometimes anti-social collective actor. Moreover, young people are constructed as consumers/economic actors. Thus, as the analysis shows, EU-related media discourse tends to reduce young people to their role of passive subjects of various policies and market forces. |
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