The Euro Crisis in the Press: Political Debate in Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom

This book offers a comparative study of the political debate on the Euro crisis in the press. In the tradition of Critical Discourse Analysis, it investigates the ways in which discourse produces and reproduces social domination, and demystifies the hegemony of specific discourses. Combining quantitative content-based and qualitative text-based analyses, the book examines the discursive constructions of the crisis in a selection of broadsheet newspapers in Germany, Poland, and the UK, and discloses their ideological foundations. The analysis of the representations of the crisis, social actors and their agency, and legitimating strategies, including the use of metaphors, demonstrates how neoliberalism determined the hegemonic discourse on the Euro crisis. It resulted in ideologically biased discursive constructions that created and legitimised an image of non-agentic social change. The book will appeal to an international audience of discourse and media studies. It will be of interest to university teachers, graduate and undergraduate students and researchers of international and comparative media studies, political communication, linguistics, and politics.

Katarzyna Sobieraj is based in Brussels and works at the European Commission. She completed her PhD at the University of Wroclaw, Poland, and MA at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. She was an associate in the international research project ’The Euro Crisis, Media Coverage, and Perceptions of Europe within the EU’ at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, UK.