Cutting into the CAP: A Media Content Analysis of the Common Agricultural Policy in European Broadsheet Newspapers
Mariusz Stankiewicz, 11896671 Master’s Thesis
Graduate School of Communication, University of Amsterdam Supervisor: Knut De Swert
Abstract
This study is a cross-national comparative content analysis of the press coverage of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) with a focus on the presence of indicators of a European Public Sphere. The visibility of CAP stories in seven broadsheet newspapers were explored, as well as featuring actors, the overall tone of coverage, how the CAP was framed, and the EU policy’s common rhetorical patterns. Results showed little cross-national variation between newspapers on CAP coverage. The overall coverage of the policy was partially Europeanized. Tone of coverage was neutral across all newspapers and the most common theme present was that of a ‘state assistance paradigm’ (Skogstad, 1998). The current study’s findings suggest that news coverage of the CAP varied little across newspapers. With changes regarding decoupling made in 2003, and with less subsidies handed out over the years, the CAP’s budget and reform issues were common subjects among all newspapers explored.
Keywords: Common Agricultural Policy, CAP, EU policy, agriculture, content analysis, European Public Sphere, quality newspapers
Introduction
For taking up forty percent of the EU budget, and for being criticized for its legitimacy and loss of political support among EU member states in the last thirty years (Zschache, 2015), one EU policy that has gone under the media radar is the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Developed after WWII to ensure food security, the CAP is considered the pillar of the EU and is the most unifying and harmonizing of policies consisting of a complex system of subsidies given out to EU farmers. Its primary objective is to ensure that European farmers are adequately compensated for high levels of agricultural output and that EU citizens have enough quality food to eat for a reasonable price. Yet problems abound in how the CAP affects the environment (Matthews, 2017); how its subsidies are distributed and managed (Markovic & Markovic, 2014); and how it leads to serious consequences on the global food market (Boysen et al., 2014).
As a result, the CAP has been picked apart by farmers, the media, economists and environmentalists, revealing a huge rift between policy consistency and its developmental
objectives. Notwithstanding its most striking statistic that eighty percent of total subsidies still go to twenty percent of EU farmers (Barkham, 2018), critics have also been quick to point out that EU-subsidized exports to developing countries cause prices to plummet resulting in local producers to go out of business (Matthews et al., 2017). Strong evidence of its protectionist claim, EU tariffs stop producers from developing countries to export their agricultural products to the European market (Marković & Marković, 2014). Though reforms to decouple EU farm payments from production have been made over the years, production-linked subsidies have not been entirely eliminated as they account for approximately twenty-seven percent of the CAP budget, according to a report by the European Commission (2017). In fact, according to Alan Matthews, one of the CAP’s foremost experts, coupled payments have been on the increase since
the 2013 reforms (Matthews, 2015). “Coupled aids have started to grow again, from a projected €2.7 billion in 2014 to a projected €4.8 billion in 2015, an increase of nearly 75% [...] this step backwards was one of the negative outcomes of the recent CAP reform” (Matthews, 2015).
Lastly, since farmers are still producing for subsidies and not for the market, this has caused tremendous environmental devastation causing the latest reforms to include ‘greening’ measures which look to “allocate a significant proportion (30%) of the direct payments envelope for income support […] to farmers who follow certain practices beneficial to the climate and the environment (Matthews, 2017).
All the above problems have resulted in public trust of the CAP eroding significantly. Moreover, since the mysterious nature of who receives farm subsidies and of what amount was revealed not by the EU but by an Open Knowledge website (farmsubsidy.org), Juncker’s communication strategy in 2017 on the future of the CAP has been devised to be more ‘simplifi[ed]’ and ‘moderniz[ed]’ (European Commission, 2017). From this we could only assume that not only was the CAP lacking transparency but communicating it was complicated and outdated. For some scholars, the biggest problem regarding the CAP is that its
communication has faltered, a consequence that can be more broadly attributed to the EU’s communication deficit.
Theoretical Background
Since the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the European Union has gone from a small trade bloc to one of the biggest single markets in the world whose members have prospered by allowing for the freedom of movement, labor and resources (Parker, 2017). But with the growth of populist far-right movements, an emerging trend of Euroscepticism, and the imminent departure of the UK from the European Union, the very same scholars who fear the CAP’s
communication breakdown also increasingly stress the importance of two conditions in order to prevent the European Union from further fracturing.
First, greater between and within-member state communication (Brüggemann & Kleinen-von Königslöw, 2009) set in a sustainable and inclusive framework and second, a thriving European public sphere described as “a constellation of communicative spaces in society that permit the circulation of information, ideas, debates” (Dahlgren, 2005). This “communicative space” for Habermas (2001) is that which permits citizens to be informed and aware of policy issues. Instead, research points to an opposing scenario.
A communication deficit of the EU has been written about ad nauseam calling into question the EU’s democratic legitimacy (e.g., Anderson and McLeod 2004; Blondel et al., 1998; Meyer, 1999; Rohrschneider, 2002; Scharpf, 1999). Despite more power lying in Brussels and the need for greater vertical Europeanization, within-country media outlets show a greater propensity to focus on national audiences and not European news related to Europe as a community (Brüggemann & Kleinen-von Königslöw, 2009; Gleissner & De Vreese, 2005). Coinciding with this finding is that sixty percent of respondents in a 2016 Eurobarometer survey feel that they are not well-informed on European issues (European Commission, pg. 32). Thus, Habermas’ vision of a European public sphere seems existentially threatened if citizens lack “the basic understanding and agreement that distinguishes a political community and marks its
competence for democracy” (Trenz, 2004).
A second problem, though in no way mutually exclusive from the first, deals with trust. With the European Union considered an elitist project (Hallstein, 1972), and branded as a “dysfunctional bureaucracy” (Rankin, 2016) by many of its detractors, public confidence in the EU has suffered tremendously. A consistent decline in trust has manifested since the 2007
financial crisis (European Commission, 2016). While the latest Standard Eurobarometer poll does show that citizens’ trust has improved only slightly (+9% points) from spring of 2015, the majority of European citizens still tend to distrust the EU (European Commission, 2017).
Furthermore, EU citizens, particularly young people, show little interest in participating in politics (Dahl et al., 2019) despite showing the most support out of all age groups for the EU (European Commission, 2014). This has reflected poorly in EU parliament elections since
turnout has been steadily declining since 1979 (EU parliament website, 2014). In the wake of the 2014 parliamentary elections a report by the European Commission entitled the “Promise of the EU” also found that "respondents generally felt that they lacked information about the European elections and the parties involved." (p.48).
Lack of information about how the EU functions, and lack of participation in local, regional, or state-level politics, leads to a lack of understanding of EU policy and its importance in our everyday lives. One key policy, which I look to explore in detail in the context of mass media, embodies this very problem.
Communicating the Common Agricultural Policy
The importance of analyzing EU policy and Brussels’ administrative role through the prism of European media outlets is important to understand the impact of knowledge on the masses and the flow of information between policy-makers, the media, and national audiences. However, not all policies or political actors, and not all the time, get the most media coverage as past research has shown. Apart from a few major European newspapers, the EU is rarely
discussed in full (Trenz, 2004; Machill et al., 2006). Attention is mostly paid to the EU around the time of major events such as a summits or international conferences and domestic political actors are mentioned more than EU actors despite governmental competences slowly shifting to
European institutions (e.g., De Vreese et al., 2001; Peter & De Vreese, 2004; Meyer, 2005; Boomgaarden et al., 2010). For some topics, however, the EU did make it to national headlines. They were humanitarian military intervention (Kantner, 2011), common defense and security policy (De Vreese & Kandyla, 2009), or monetary and immigration policy (Koopmans, 2004). Still, other subjects like the ratification of the EU constitution and EU integration rarely get mentioned as a uniquely European topic but more so as a catalyst for national debates (Vetters et al., 2009; Kleinen-von Königslöw, 2012). The CAP is also one of those topics which sees little media attention and when it is discussed in the press, appears as a fleeting subject with a greater number of domestic actors mentioned.
In a 2004 study on policy coverage in twelve European ‘quality’ broadsheets, agrarian policy was represented poorly with none of the newspapers guaranteeing full coverage of the CAP (Trenz, 2004). This, as mentioned above, creates an uninformed citizen, and provides further evidence of a communication deficit. Coinciding with the results of a 2017 Special Eurobarometer on the CAP, ten percent know about the CAP but with fifty-seven percent having heard of the policy but not really knowing its details. Almost one third (32%) of EU citizens have never heard of this policy before. This, a surprise, considering that in the same report, a large majority of EU citizens (92%) believe that agriculture and rural areas are important for the future of the EU. Needless to say, EU citizens are hardly in the know about things they feel strongly about.
In an attempt to bridge the widening gap between what is public knowledge and the CAP’s inherent complexities, the Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development started a public consultation on 2 February 2017 for twelve weeks along with an impact assessment which will precede CAP reform legislation in 2018 (Matthews, 2017). The
implication is that Brussels is looking to gauge public discourse surrounding one of its most important albeit controversial policies. But despite renewed efforts for a new social contract between the EU and citizens, many critics still call into question the manner in which transparency, openness, and access to information is being brought to the EU masses (Bijsterveld, 2004). The same could be said of how the CAP is presented to a greater pan-European audience. With coverage of the EU in the media generally considered to be “barely existent, homogenous and mostly negative” (Spanier, 2010), it would be imperative to precisely investigate which EU policy—communicated adequately or not by Brussels—bares the
abovementioned designations. Despite the commonly held perception of the EU’s
communication deficit, an investigation of the CAP in the media deserves greater attention as it may shed light on exactly where this communication breakdown manifests—on the part of EU institutions, national media outlets, or if this informational deficiency says more about the EU citizen than those promulgating like the former and mediating like the latter?
This study will look at how much and what type of communication about the CAP has been presented to the public through their national broadsheets. The purpose of the current research is exploratory in nature due to a lack of research on media coverage of this EU policy. However, in line with Brüggemann and Kleinen-von Königslöw’s (2009) and Kandyla and De Vreese’s work (2009), it is my intention to examine characteristics of ‘Europeanization’ of national public spheres by identifying 1) patterns of visibility of CAP stories in the news 2) the visibility of EU actors and 3) the evaluative dimensions of CAP coverage. Lastly, I will look at media discourse surrounding the CAP. In her research on CAP media coverage in the German press, Zschache identifies three common patterns in which the debate has been framed. Referred to as farm-policy paradigms, they are the ‘state assistance paradigm’ (Skogstad, 1998); the
‘market liberal paradigm’ (Coleman, Grant & Josling, 2004) and the ‘multifunctional agricultural paradigm’ (Moyer & Josling, 2002). The following are the research questions pertaining to the current study:
RQ1: How visible are CAP and agricultural issues in European broadsheet newspapers? RQ2: Are there differences between broadsheet newspapers in the visibility of CAP and agricultural issues?
RQ3: How visible are EU political actors, domestic political actors and other actors in CAP and agricultural coverage?
RQ4: With reference to EU institutions or the role of Brussels, how is the CAP depicted in the national media?
RQ5: Is the CAP framed negatively or positively in the press?
RQ6: What are the rhetorical patterns visible in media coverage of the CAP?
Research Design & Methodology
The newspapers selected for the current research project were considered ‘quality’
broadsheets. The justification for their selection can be found in Trenz (2004) where “the view of the political landscape of Europe looks different through the windscreen of the quality press than, let’s say, the view through the windscreen of the tabloid press.” Though I aimed to analyze the leading newspaper in each country with the highest circulation, constraints arose with the language of coding in that the low-circulating English versions proved more accessible in some cases. This, as a result, lead to a limited data set. The newspapers were El País1 from Spain (n=42), circulation ±238,560; Gazeta Wyborcza1 from Poland (n=45), circulation ±151, 077;
1
The Copenhagen Post2 from Denmark (n=32), circulation ± 15,000; The Guardian2 from the UK (n=70), circulation ± 148,169; The Times of Malta2 from Malta (n=42), circulation ±
37,000; and The Portugal News2 from Portugal (n=43), circulation ± 20,000; The Irish Times3 from Ireland (n=38), circulation ±60,000 (own website).
Coding was also limited to the online versions of quality broadsheets. Moreover, all newspapers needed to fulfill the criteria which was that selected newspapers provided 1) an adequate amount of articles that discussed or mentioned the CAP or agriculture issues within the country and 2) provided articles in a language that the coder was able to understand for the purpose of coding.
The newspapers selected in each country were also chosen for their overall focus of the CAP debate within national media as well as how important the EU policy is in influencing policymaking within each country. Other factors which came into play for selected newspapers were chosen so as to contribute to possible data diversity as in, for example, relative land mass dedicated to farming; agricultural traditions seen in the division between Mediterranean Europe versus Temperate Europe (Bogucki, 1996); varied financial demands on Brussels; the need for sustainable use of agricultural land; productivity of land. Where depth in selection may have been sacrificed, breadth made up for in that media outlets spanned the entirety of Europe.
In Zschache’s research of CAP coverage in two German newspapers, most articles coded fell within the range of 2003 and 2008. This period was known as the CAP’s issue-attention cycle (Zschache, 2015). In 2003, the CAP underwent a radical reform under Fischler and in 2008
2
For outlets The Copenhagen Post, The Guardian, The Times of Malta and The Portugal News: Wikipedia 2018.
3
was the policy’s ‘health check.’ However, for the current research, the period for which data was collected in LexisNexis began in 2003 and extended up to 2018. This was decided in the interest of the current study’s exploratory analysis in order to have a more updated and varied data set on the CAP since reforms have been ongoing since 2003 with the last major changes made in 2015 (Matthews, 2017). Also, due to the CAP’s complicated nature, a communication agenda was initiated in 2017 by the European Commission. This also could have affected how the CAP was communicated in the press. Unlike Zschache’s research where only two newspapers were analyzed, the current study looks at seven in order to increase generalizability.
For The Copenhagen Post, The Portugal News and The Times of Malta, keyword search terms were entered into their websites’ corresponding search bar for relevant articles. For lack of data on the subject, broad search terms were utilized rather than terms of a specific selection criterion. For example, keyword search terms for El País were ‘Política Agrícola Común’ (PAC), ‘agricultura’ as well as ‘subsidios’ and ‘subsidio agrícola.’ For Gazeta Wyborcza, they were ‘Wspólna Polityka Rolna Unii Europejskiej,’ ‘rolnictwo’ as well as ‘subwencja’ and ‘dopłaty rolnicze’ For the remaining newspapers, the English search terms were Common Agricultural Policy, CAP, agriculture, subsidies, as well as agricultural subsidies. If articles contained one or more of the above mentioned terms, the article was thus selected for coding. Overall, the articles analyzed focused mainly on issues related to the urgent need of CAP reform, distribution of EU funds to member states, agricultural yields of a given crop, the global food economy, the pros and cons of subsidies, the extent to which EU funds help preserve biodiversity, etc. By this standard, a total of 297 articles made up the corpus of data for a media content analysis.
Actors were defined as “persons, groups, institutions or organizations that were
mentioned at least once or quoted” (Peter & De Vreese, 2004 as cited by Kandyla & de Vreese, 2011). Two separate Qualtrics survey inputs were used, one for ‘mentioned’ and another for ‘quoted.’ A minimum of one actor was selected to a maximum of five. Actors were not repeated once they had been identified. As observed in Kandyla and De Vreese (2011), actors were categorized as: EU supranational actors; political actors from other EU member-states; domestic political actors; international political actors; and non-political actors.
Tone of Coverage
Each article was coded for emotional tone in a 9-point Likert scale. For example, the articles were coded if they criticized harshly the CAP’s role within the country or if the article praised the CAP as a successful EU policy. The scale ranged from 1 (Very Negative) to 9 (Very Positive) with 5 as neutral. The Likert scale is used to measure “attitude providing a range of responses to a given question or statement” (Subedi, 2016). It is a commonly used measure in social science surveys and is one of the most appropriate for collecting attitudinal data (Subedi, 2016).
A battery of other ‘yes/no’ tone-measuring questions was also implemented such as ‘Does the article describe the CAP as a positive contributor to the country’s national economy?’ ‘Does the article blame the CAP for a decrease in farmers’ revenue/wellbeing?’ or ‘Does the article utilize the CAP as a way to condemn the EU’s overreaching influence in the country’s national affairs?’ Such questions could provide additional information regarding the CAP’s tone whose results can lend itself to a more detailed analysis of the CAP in the seven newspapers examined.
A Krippendorff’s alpha test was also conducted to determine inter-coder reliability. The subsample for the reliability test consisted of thirty newspaper articles randomly selected from the seven outlets used in the current research. This subsample was coded by an independent coder familiar with the current study’s codebook.
Media Discourse
What was initially thought of as an EU policy aimed at safeguarding the future of farming was soon criticized for being highly “interventionist, protectionist and subventionist” (Zschache, 2015). Further criticism the CAP received was that it vigorously maintained
‘structural surpluses.’ The famous epithets ‘wine lakes’ and ‘butter mountains’ (Reinhorn, 2007) were some of the media buzzwords which cast a shadow over Brussels’ unfair policymaking and their attempt at manipulating the market by stockpiling these ‘surpluses.’ This criticism resulted in changes moving the CAP away from state assistance into a more neoliberal realm where quotas were eliminated, tariffs reduced, and a market orientation was favored. The CAP’s midterm review in 2002 also ushered in a new era of rural development which saw a greater focus on cross-compliance and ‘greening.’ Farmers in member states were obliged to invest thirty percent of direct payments to practices which benefitted the climate or environment (Matthews et al., 2017) (see figure 1 for overall changes). The cause to this ideological shift can be traced back to, according to Zschache (2015), the influence of international institutions such as the WTO, OECD, and the World Bank. With external forces setting the agenda on farm-policy, the current research would also benefit from analyzing if international actors appear in the articles of the selected newspapers to either support or refute Zschache’s claim.
Figure 1: Evolution of CAP payment amount and payment allocation from 1990 to 2020. Source: DG AGRI, http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/cap-post-2013/graphs/index_en.htm
With the abovementioned trends taking up a good amount of scholarly debate on the CAP, the articles in the current research will also be explored similarly to Zschache’s use of three farm policy paradigms (2015) which she found useful in her CAP framing research of the German press. They are, as mentioned, ‘state assistance paradigm,’ ‘market liberal paradigm’ and ‘multifunctionality paradigm.’ Under the ‘state assistance paradigm’ news regarding the safeguarding of farmers’ income and employment; maintenance of production; the agrarian structure and of the CAP; and food security were dominant themes in the articles she coded. Thus yes/no questions were devised corresponding to said themes’ presence in the articles. The questions concerning the ‘market liberal paradigm’ were: Did the article focus on market
orientation? Globalization? Or the economic development of rural economies? Lastly, in the ‘multifunctionality paradigm’ questions were in the realm of ecological protection, consumer protection, and matters concerning the public good.
Results
Referring to RQ1 and RQ2, figure 2 shows the number of CAP-related stories for each of the seven countries and their respective newspapers. Overall, results showed little cross-national variation between newspapers on CAP coverage. With the exception of the UK and Poland, Portugal and Spain devoted a moderate amount of media attention to the CAP and rightfully so as they were recipients of the most agricultural subsidies except for Portugal which received a low amount yet devoted as much media attention to the issue. Conversely, Spain was the highest recipient of funds for both the 2007 to 2013 and 2014 to 2020 period yet CAP visibility was at the same level as Poland and Portugal. A surprising trend is that Irish, Danish and Maltese newspapers showed proportionate CAP media coverage to funds received.
Assuming that all CAP-related articles were coded during this time period for each newspaper, the average article output ranged from 4.67 articles per year for The Guardian to 2.37 for the Copenhagen Post, with a greater concentration of articles published during the CAP’s issue-attention cycle (Zschache, 2015). Noteworthy, is to look at CAP coverage in relation to each country’s agriculture contribution to the GDP (see figure 2). The most striking observation is UK’s greater attention to the CAP despite agriculture contributing only an average .69% to the economy between 2010 and 2016 (see appendix 1 for overall % of GDP attributed to
agriculture).
Figure 2: CAP Coverage (2003-2018) to CAP Expenditure (2014-2020) + % average of GDP (2010 - 2016)1.
With regards to visibility of actors (RQ3), it is evident that CAP news was not a
Europeanized issue, with 38 percent of actors being domestic (see figure 3). Only 26 percent of all actors mentioned were EU supranational actors thus suggesting partial vertical
Europeanization. Very little reference was made to other EU political actors with only 8 percent mentioned, suggesting low horizontal Europeanization.
1
Despite changes in regulations on how member states were to use CAP payments, overall change in expenditure data from 2007 to 2013 was negligible so inclusion in the graph was omitted.
Figure 3: Total actors mentioned and quoted, n = 297.
Across individual newspapers, The Portugal News and The Times of Malta mentioned EU supranational actors the most with 51 and 33 percent, respectively (see table 1). The least mentioned were The Guardian and The Copenhagen Post with 19 and 5 percent, respectively. Conversely, the highest percentage of domestic actors mentioned was The Copenhagen Post at 53 percent and The Irish Times at 45 percent. Non-political actors mostly appeared in The Copenhagen Post (40 percent) while the least in The Irish Times (18 percent).
Percentage of featuring actors mentioned across newspapers, n = 297 Newspapers EU Actors Political Actors from other EU States Domestic Political Actors International Political Actors Non political Actors El País 32% 5% 41% 2% 20% Gazeta Wyborcza 23% 8% 32% 5% 32% Times of Malta 33% 7% 41% 0% 19% The Guardian 19% 13% 35% 4% 29%
The Irish Times 32% 5% 45% 0% 18%
The Copenhagen
Post 5% 0% 53% 3% 40%
The Portugal News 51% 4% 27% 2% 16%
Tone
As per tone measured through the 9-point Likert scale (RQ4 and RQ5), a one-way ANOVA test identified a significant between-group difference (F (6,297) = 4.027, p = .001). A Bonferroni post hoc test determined a significant difference between The Guardian and The Irish Times (p = .000) while all other pairwise comparisons failed to show significance. An
independent samples T-test however did show a significant difference between The Guardian (M=4.169, SD=1.3521) and The Copenhagen Post (M=4.9697, SD=.636); t(102) = -3.23, p = .002. Overall, The Guardian depicted the CAP as slightly negative while the Irish Times depicted it as neither positive nor negative. Overall, the tone across newspapers was not different (see figure 4).
A significant majority of articles neither described the CAP as a positive nor as a negative contributor to the country’s national economy (see table 2), a figure which seems to back up the Likert tonal measurements. By the same token, less than ten percent of articles coded blamed the CAP for a loss of control of the country’s agricultural policy as well as a decrease in farmer revenue. Only 16 percent of articles praised the CAP for an increase in farmers’ earnings
and wellbeing. Only 6 percent of articles coded excoriate the CAP and the EU’s growing interference in national affairs.
Table 2
CAP Tone Questions and Answers in percentage and Kalpha Coefficients
QUESTION YES NO Kalpha
Does the article describe the CAP as a positive contributor to the
country’s national economy? 30% 70% 0.0233
Does the article describe the CAP as a negative contributor to the
country’s national economy? 27% 73% 0.5129
Does the article blame the CAP for the loss of control of the
country’s agricultural policy? 9% 91% -0.0737
Does the article blame the CAP for a decrease in farmers’
revenue/wellbeing? 4% 96% 0.3964
Does the article praise the CAP for an increase in farmers’
revenue/wellbeing? 16% 84% 0.1319
Does the article blame the CAP for the low quality of the country’s
agricultural output? 2% 98% 0.0000
Does the article praise the CAP for the high quality of the
country’s agricultural output? 5% 95% 0.6577
Does the article utilize the CAP as a way to condemn the EU’s
overreaching influence in the country’s national affairs? 6% 94% -0.0775
In order to determine inter-rater reliability, the Krippendorff’s alpha test was conducted on the Likert tone measure and tone variable questions. Overall, the level of agreement on a subset of 30 coded articles was low after running two inter-rater tests. Due to low agreement, not all measures were used for the current analysis. A few are worthy of mentioning. They are the Likert tone measurement (α = .8180), producing a very good result in the study; the question: ‘Does the article describe the CAP as a negative contributor to the country’s national economy?’ (α = .5129); the question: ‘Does the article blame the CAP for a decrease in farmers’
revenue/wellbeing?’ (α = .3964); ‘Does the article praise the CAP for the high quality of the country’s agricultural output?’ (α = .6577) (see table 2 for remaining Kalphas).
Figure 4: Average tone across newspapers, n = 297.
Media Discourse
The debate surrounding the CAP, in a majority of the articles coded, fell in line with the ‘state assistance paradigm’ first discussed in Skogstad (1998) (see table 3). Considered the cornerstone of the EU, within this paradigm lies the very core of the CAP’s interventionist program aimed at “overcom[ing] food shortages of the 1950s, achieving self-sufficiency and then generating cyclical and structural surpluses” as outlined in the Treaty of Rome in 1958. Its foundational principles include increasing agricultural productivity, ensuring a decent standard of living for farmers, stabilize markets, make accessible agricultural supplies, and set prices on agro-products considering the consumers’ best interests (European Parliament, 2004). Of all
articles coded, 46 percent framed the CAP considering one or all of the ‘state assistance paradigm’ objectives. These ideas were expressed in the following statements: “What citizens want is employment, growth, security, prosperity in a context of solidarity” (Tempest, The Guardian, 15 June 2005). “[L]as ayudas directas introducidas desde 1992 tienen un efecto claro en las rentas de los agricultores y constituyen una red de seguridad de sus ingresos ante la variabilidad de las cosechas” [Direct assistance introduced in 1992 has a clear effect on agricultural income and constitutes a security network of income against harvest variability] (Rocamora, El País, 14 June 2009). “Funds from the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy have helped dampen the effects of the economic recession on agriculture and forestry in Portugal” (n/a, The Portugal News, 15 May 2014).
Table 3
Relative weight in media discourse (%) of CAP rhetorical patterns
Complementing the ‘state assistance paradigm’ is the ‘multifunctionality agriculture paradigm’ (Moyer and Josling, 2002), a prevalent counter-rhetoric in the press which appears in the articles coded mostly after the 2003 Fischler reforms and before its health check in 2008. Realizing the devastating effects of trade-distorting subsidies and overproduction linked to environmental devastation (Matthews et al., 2017), framing of the CAP in the press took on a critical note highlighting the consequences of said ‘structural surpluses’ as was written in stone
Paradigms and Policy Debates Media Discourse
State Assistance 46% Market Liberalism 13% Multifunctionality 21% Reforms 13% Budget 7% Totals (N=674)
in the Treaty of Rome. As a result, the media looked to embrace ecological and consumer protection as well as the perceptions of the farming industry as a public good. Identical in proportion to Zschache’s research on CAP coverage in German media, ‘multifunctionality’ framing appeared in 21 percent of all articles coded in the current research (see table 3).
Multifunctionality ideas were exemplified in statements such as “Blisko 2,4 mld złoty trafiło do 100 tys. rolników, którzy przechodzą na ekologiczne metody produkcji. Unia daje takim
gospodarstwom rekompensatę za to, że rezygnują z intensywnego nawożenia i stosowania środków ochrony roślin.” (Śmigiel, Gazeta Wyborcza, 2 April 2010). [Nearly 2.4 billion zlotys went to 100,000 farmers who switched to ecological production methods. The Union gives such farmers compensation for giving up intense fertilization for the use of plant protection products.] "‘[G]reening measures’ [are] designed to encourage more sustainable farming, such as the obligation for tillage farmers to have ecological focus areas (EFA) on their land” (Lynch, The Irish Times, 20 March 2013). “It would be a benefit for the environment and biodiversity to restructure a larger area to organic land, because in organic agriculture it is forbidden to use synthetic pesticides that reduce the biodiversity of plants, animals and microorganisms” (Christian, The Copenahgen Post, 7 April 2017).
The last debate on the CAP in the European press is the ‘market liberal paradigm’
(Coleman, Grant & Josling, 2004). An additional component of the Fischler reform in 2003 born out of WTO negotiations was the liberalization of world trade and the further market
deregulation of the agro industry (Markovic & Markovic, 2014). Other objectives included rural development and to improve competitiveness in the market. Trade-distorting effects was the key focus of this media rhetoric which saw framing the CAP as eliminating payments linked to production and simply letting the global food market work itself out from an economics
perspective. Market liberal framing was present in 13 percent of all articles coded. Examples in the press include: "‘Competition from outside the EU will increase in the future,’" (Farrugia, Times of Malta, 9 July 2005). “The neoliberal policies and open borders imposed by the US, Europe and emerging countries through the WTO have failed to deliver the promised benefits” (Bove, The Guardian, 5 2010). “We should be opening our markets and removing trade-distorting subsidies and in particular, doing more to urgently tackle the waste of the common agricultural policy" (n/a, The Guardian, 29 2005).
Additionally, two separate categories were included following some initial inductive coding. Inductive coding provides an “open view to attempt to reveal the array of possible frames, beginning with very loosely defined preconceptions of these frames” (Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000). The categories were ‘reforms’ and ‘budget cuts.’
CAP reforms and budget cuts were parallel issues brought up in many articles. Reforms were present in 13 percent and reporting about EU subsidies being cut were present in 7 percent (see table 3). Example statements include: "It is high time that the EU makes the root and branch reform of the CAP that's needed." (Osborn, Guardian, 24 Sep. 2003) and “by the end of 2005 Europe’s sugar growers can expect to suffer substantial cut backs in subsidies” (n/a, The Portugal News, 2 July 2005).
Discussion
As a recap, the purpose of the current research was to explore the communicative framework surrounding news of the Common Agricultural Policy in quality newspapers and to increase understanding about how this controversial EU policy was presented to the public in European media from February 7th 2003 to February 15th 2018. The primary focus was on the visibility of CAP news, actors mentioned or quoted in the articles, the overall tone of coverage of
the CAP not to mention, how the CAP was framed and its common rhetorical patterns. The exploratory nature of the current study provided a wealth of information not only on the CAP itself but on the technical nature of social science research whose research limitations on the subject of the CAP shall be drawn out later in detail.
First, the visibility of the CAP in the media of seven European countries was described in detail and allowed myself a better look at CAP data and trends throughout the years. When analyzing visibility data across all countries, CAP stories were featured the most in The Guardian (UK) and the least in Times of Malta (Malta), a finding which could be explained by the fact that the UK has been part of the Economic Union since EU-12 in 1993 and Malta becoming a member state only with EU 25 in 2004 (European Commission, 2018). By this reasoning, however, Malta’s co-entrant Poland should have covered the CAP at the same level but due to land mass, agricultural traditions, and varying demands on Brussels, it would make sense to see more CAP news in Poland than in Malta despite citizens from both countries feeling strongly about agricultural development (European Commission, 2017). Moreover, Poland’s reliance on agriculture is greater than Malta using the metric of agriculture contribution to the GDP (2.93% vs. 1.46%) (see appendix 1, figure 6, for more data).
Although this study was initially designed to provide a window onto EU policy coverage in the European press, my intention was not to comprehensively examine all European CAP media. That being said, with whatever available data was gathered, it is also possible that the CAP was simply not a ‘hot topic’ since too few articles over a period of more than fifteen years were recorded. This finding is compatible with Trenz (2004) in that European media does not guarantee full coverage of communitarian policy fields such as the CAP and that the media
prefer “news coverage about big events and debates that mark the future of European integration.”
Since all newspapers were of quality broadsheets, it was also expected that this
controversial EU policy be examined with the highest news standard in other words, carefully or ‘neutrally.’ Contrary to what Trenz wrote in his research on media coverage of EU policies, different media from different countries did “seem to travel along the same road” (2004). However, inevitable in such a research design are biases which thus create inaccurate
implications. In keeping with quality broadsheets, news about the CAP seemed balanced, in fact, too balanced. Had I investigated more broadly with different voices on the subject, this may have shown a different view of the CAP’s media/political landscape. For example, since solidifying a party majority in the 2015 parliamentary elections, Poland’s current Law and Justice (PiS) government became quite critical of the EU (The Economist, 2018). Thus, right-leaning media in Poland—and quite possibly in all other countries in the EU—might have looked at the CAP as Brussels’ ‘meddling appendage.’ In other words, as a way for the EU to infiltrate domestic political matters not to mention, affect state sovereignty and decision-making. Still, incorporating media from more conservative sources or even tabloids would have at best produced diverse results or at worse, skewed tonal data completely. Overall, coverage in many articles looked at the benefits of the CAP but also provided balance in saying that the CAP needed to be reformed over the years to be up to date with the demands of the public. This ‘balance’ might also have contributed to coder uncertainty regarding tone measurements as will be discussed shortly.
Along with explicit knowledge gained on the CAP itself, an implicit understanding of social science research was also learned which I shall discuss and which I shall also utilize as suggestions for how to improve further research on the CAP. An initial issue I encountered was
with sampling. Undeniably, the current articles selected were not an adequate representation of European broadsheets and less so, unfortunately, a representation of CAP coverage in the media. All newspapers selected except for The Portugal News, The Copenhagen Post, and Times of Malta reported on the CAP in their original language. It would have been more reliable in the current research to code articles in their original language by a group of language proficient coders. However, due to myself being able to code in only three of the possible six languages— and quite possibly missing out on certain meanings and nuances of interpreted text—this limited me in article selection and quite possibly in the interpretation of emotional tone. This also raises the question of message syntony: was CAP reporting in the English newspapers of Malta, Denmark and Portugal different from CAP reporting in the news of their native language?
Due to language issues, selection was also based on convenience yet pretests on applicability of selections to the current research questions was missing. Riffe et al. (2014) mention this as convenience sampling which is “a census in which the population is defined by availability.” Pretest compatibility would have determined if “logical or deductive reason [was] dictated by the nature of the research project.”
Moreover, keyword search terms may have resulted in selecting relevant text yet in some countries this was irrelevant either way. For example, The Copenhagen Post did have many articles about agriculture—with more domestic actors mentioned than EU actors—but little about the CAP. It is possible that the CAP was simply a non-issue since Denmark is only a slight net gainer (Matthews, 2015) meaning they put more into the EU budget than what they get out of it. Though to the benefit of public knowledge, and to help repair EU’s communication deficit, highlighting this disparity may invite further criticism of the EU but at what cost since this criticism would be coming at at time where Euroscepticism needs to be reined in. Nonetheless, to
state that the CAP was a non-issue in Denmark’s English newspaper is also more conjecture than statistically-proven fact since Danish broadsheets (in the Danish language) were not examined at all.
With the current research failing to identify vertical or horizontal Europeanization in CAP articles, results however did show a significant domestic angle and that in each EU member state’s public sphere, national actors fared far greater than EU actors. It can therefore be stated that, in line with past research, the European public sphere has yet to emerge and of its
possibility to emerge in the coming years or decades, unlikely.
According to Machill et al. (2006), one precondition for a Europe-wide communications system is that of a common language. Yet EU citizens “live in their languages as special
‘structures of perception and understanding’” (Kielmansegg, 1994, as cited by Machill et al., 2006). The same could be said of local journalists, that perhaps it is the lack of a common language that prevents them from having access to EU actors on EU policy matters. As a result of this common language deficiency, an EU-wide form of mass media may also suffer (Kantner, 2002, as cited by Machill et al., 2006). Strong evidence of a healthy communication network in Europe would show that articles coded identified a high level of domestic actors and an equally high level of EU supranational actors, where “[p]rotagonists in one place in the EU enter into debate with protagonists in other places (Machill et al., 2006).
As a third reason behind little vertical Europeanization is that perhaps national journalists have failed to globalize their network spheres in that micro-level constraints such as individual habits, personal traits and news values (Reese & Shoemaker, 2016) force them to see a European issue with a very narrow national lens. Machill (1997) also lists other similar factors that may prevent a wider perspective such as “the self-image of journalists, how journalists are judged by
others, the organization of journalistic work, the scientific discourse on journalism, the training of journalists, the comparison of journalistic products as well as basic social and legal
conditions.”
Nonetheless, despite more domestic actors mentioned and quoted, I would hesitate to underestimate the overall importance of EU supranational actors mentioned in the articles. Looking at the data globally, one could immediately tell that the debate was clearly dominated by an elite-driven group of domestic actors, powerful in their own public spheres, yet the significant presence of EU Supranational actors does reveal the contentiousness of CAP issues between Brussels and domestic politicians. On many fronts this contentiousness was played out in the ‘national arena’ with the themes most dominant in the press on the CAP such as budget issues, the need for ‘greening’ the CAP, as well as the most radical change which is to reform the CAP by eradicating subsidies altogether.
The inter-rater reliability test for the current research has identified a certain degree of structural misunderstandings between coders regarding variables on which blame could be placed on a number of factors worth discussing. Replicability of the current study would have been attacked on various fronts, starting with the absence of a comprehensive set of guidelines given to coders to be thoroughly studied and which would work to harmonize a common understanding of what emotional tone is and on its spectrum, where it was present in the text. What certainly proved confusing in coding was how to deal with emotional interpretation in text where, for example, the headline and lead may have been deceivingly positive in an article but certain negative phraseology in the text—or perhaps chalking this up to the ambiguity of impartiality in well-balanced journalism—may have thrown off perceptions of the article requiring a different emotional measure altogether. For example, in one article in The Portugal
News titled “Portugal says CAP accord excellent result despite voting against it,” the article headline may have placed it at right of neutral yet language embedded in the text may have forced you to second guess your evaluation like “Brussels say the accord marks 'the start of a new era', although critics say the deal is a messy compromise.” How to navigate through the murky waters of interpretation, where lexically the connotations of ‘messy’ and ‘compromise’ may have caused one to downgrade their positive valuation without tabulating specific
positive/negative words and considering other persuasive and emotionally charged syntax so as to create a more cohesive and holistic measure of tone.
Utilizing the Likert scale, this seemed to have worked better than other questions. The overall general impression of a text could be mentally aggregated. However, with dichotomous emotional tone questioning, this is quite different. No reference point exists with yes and no or not sure and using a battery of questions in such a way often fails to uncover the nuances of language and meaning, and fails at tackling the issue of subjectivity. As a recommendation for future research, a single yes/no question in the battery should have contained a subset of battery ‘safety net’ questions and explanations to ensure interpretation would not be lost in a grey area. Moreover, the current study would have benefitted from these ‘safety net’ type questions
forensically outlined in an “explicit written protocol” (Lacy et al., 2015) so that coders would be able to fall back on the management of subjective language and on how a positively, neutrally, or negatively coded article really looks like.
Due to the scarcity of scholarly precedents and past empirical research on the CAP and media coverage in Europe, analysis using previous research proved challenging for there was not much to borrow from resulting in me blindly taking a lead on the subject. Nonetheless, theories such as the Europeanization of media (Koopmans and Erbe, 2003), State Assistance Paradigm
(Skogstad, 1998)), Market Liberalization (Coleman, Grant & Josling, 2004)) and
Multifunctionality (Moyer and Josling, 2002) were beneficial in order to make sense of an EU policy in the press. Still, in coding featuring actors I’m also left wondering if the media can be an actor itself since every newspaper ostensibly frames stories in their own unique way, sets their own agenda, or succumbs to greater influence (Reese & Shoemaker, 2016).
The present study did its best in applying the social scientific method to understand how the CAP was presented in the media and perhaps more broadly how the EU looks to disseminate information regarding crucial EU policy. Apart from the abovementioned recommendations, and to build on the value of what the current research attained, future research on the CAP should look at coverage more exhaustively and include all EU-28 countries with several coders trained. A critical aspect of the study would also be to include as much reliable data as possible so as to avoid the pitfalls of generalizations and to be as specific in relating results to research question conceptualizations.
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Appendix 1
Figure 5: Agriculture contribution to GDP across countries of quality broadsheets investigated between 2002 to 2016 (Source: The World Bank, 2018).
Appendix 2
Codebook: Common Agricultural Policy in National Broadsheets_version2 Var01 – Date of Article
The article’s date of publication. For example: the 30th of December, 2016 will be categorized as ‘301216’, thus as DDMMYY.
Var02 – Media Outlet
_El País (Spain) _The Copenhagen Post (Denmark) _Times of Malta (Malta) _The Portugal News (Portugal) _The Guardian (UK) _Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland) _The Irish Times (Ireland)
Var03 - Identification of Article Coded
This number consists of ten digits in total consisting of the date, chronological order of article coded, and media outlet.
First & Second digits: Media Outlet (see above)
81: El País (Spain) 85: The Copenhagen Post (Denmark) 82: Times of Malta (Malta) 86: The Portugal News (Portugal) 83: The Guardian (UK) 87: Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland) 84: The Irish Times (Ireland)
Third, Forth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth digits: Date (DDMMYY) Ninth and Tenth digits: Chronological order (01~99)
For example, if an article from Gazeta Wyborcza was published on the 23rd of August 2016, and was the 43rd article coded by coder in that newspaper then the article ID would look as follows:
8523081643
Var04 – Visibility of CAP
Visibility of CAP and agricultural stories will be tallied per newspaper over each country. All data will be put into an excel file through Qualtrics for further analysis. Here is a table of tallied data as an example:
Var05 – Visibility of Actors
Five categories of actors to be coded are as follows:
1) EU supranational actors include the mentioning of EU officials of important standing or an EU decision-making institution.
2) Political Actors from other EU member-states include the mentioning of politicians or institutions from other EU member-states, excluding the country origin of the article coded. 3) Domestic political actors include the mentioning of domestic politicians or national institutions unaffiliated with the EU and from the country where the article is coded.
4) International political actors include politicians/officials or institutions from outside of the EU.
5) Non-political actors include the mentioning of individuals not affiliated with any political body. Such could be representatives of NGOs or EU citizens.
Identify the main actors MENTIONED in the article (maximum 5). ___EU supranational actors
___Political actors from other EU member-states ___Domestic political actors
___International political actors ___Non-political actors.
Identify the main actors QUOTED in the article (maximum 5).
A quote is considered to be words from a text or speech written or spoken by another person who is not the author of the text at hand.
___EU supranational actors
___Political actors from other EU member-states ___Domestic political actors
___International political actors ___Non-political actors.
Var06 – Tone of Coverage
Essentially, this question is asking how positive, negative, or neutral is CAP shown to be in the articles. On a Likert scale of 1 to 9, coverage of the CAP will be evaluated as (1) very negative; (5) neutral or (9) very positive. Though unrelated to the current research, here is an example with ‘thematic’ and ‘episodic’ as variables in television news broadcasting.
Moreover, an additional battery of specific questions will be asked to determine tone in the case the Likert scale may result in an unreliable data set. The following is a list:
Q8: Does the article describe the CAP as a positive contributor to the country’s national economy? (_Yes) or (_No)
Q9: Does the article describe the CAP as a negative contributor to the country’s national economy? (_Yes) or (_No)
Q10: Does the article blame the CAP for the loss of control of the country’s agricultural policy? (_Yes) or (_No)
Q11: Does the article blame the CAP for a decrease in farmers’ revenue/wellbeing? (_Yes) or (_No)
Q12: Does the article praise the CAP for an increase in farmers’ revenue/wellbeing? (_Yes) or (_No)
Q13: Does the article blame the CAP for the low quality of the country’s agricultural output? (_Yes) or (_No)
Q14: Does the article praise the CAP for the high quality of the country’s agricultural output? (_Yes) or (_No)
Q15: Does the article utilize the CAP as a way to condemn the EU’s overreaching influence in the country’s national affairs? (_Yes) or (_No)
