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As a result of the rise of online communication and political divisions based on symbols, rather than structure (decrease in the importance of class-based voting), citizens are increasingly linked to news outlets that articulate and reinforce their views. The process is facilitated by the spontaneous processes of bottom–up communication that excludes, in an iterative process, people who express views that are inconsistent with the prevailing opinion. The emergence of "information verticals" is a significant influence on attitudes to some issues covered in political debate. These effects operate with regard to so-called easy issues, that is, those rooted in emotions and in the symbolic sphere. Our article is an empirical test of our hypotheses about the effects of media framing of "hard" and "easy" issues. We apply a survey experiment method to verify whether contact with news coverage has an effect on attitudes, taking into account the political orientation and cognitive skills of citizens. Our empirical analyses confirm that a hostile media framing of migration changes respondents' attitudes no matter their level of cognitive engagement. The data come from Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What we have been living since October 2013 when we were shocked by the images of two successive ship-wreck with hundreds of deads In front onf Lapmpedusa's and Libia's coasts, it is not really a refugees' crisis. It's my opinion that we are rather talking about problems and challenges that are ours, as far as I see, although the refugees are the very center, the ones who suffer. It is our crisis in several ways, not other people's crisis as it has been built from both some of the mass media and messages of the european leaders, In a great part through some falacles that, I Insist, it's precise to analyze and to criticize. It Is also a consecuence of our failure, or, If preferred, our refusal to tackle the challenges of our own European Project, that lead us to discover contradictions inside this European Project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is an open question why news media cover political campaigns the way they do. Framing elections in terms of conflict or strategy or focusing on horse-race framing and the role media and journalists themselves play in elections is commonplace, but this study investigates the factors that explain the variation in campaign news coverage. The context of our study is the 2009 European Parliamentary elections, and we use a cross-national media content analysis (N = 52,009) conducted in all 27 European Union member states. Findings show that time, country, and media characteristics all matter in explaining the way news media frame elections, however, to different extents and with different emphasis. Especially the variation in conflict framing is contingent upon the medium, the electoral system, and public aversion against the EU. We conclude with a discussion of our findings in the light of the ongoing debate on the role and impact of media framing during election campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: A trend towards automation of scientific research has recently resulted in what has been termed "data-driven inquiry" in various disciplines, including physics and biology. The automation of many tasks has been identified as a possible future also for the humanities and the social sciences, particularly in those disciplines concerned with the analysis of text, due to the recent availability of millions of books and news articles in digital format. In the social sciences, the analysis of news media is done largely by hand and in a hypothesis-driven fashion: the scholar needs to formulate a very specific assumption about the patterns that might be in the data, and then set out to verify if they are present or not. Methodology/Principal Findings: In this study, we report what we think is the first large scale content-analysis of cross-linguistic text in the social sciences, by using various artificial intelligence techniques. We analyse 1.3 M news articles in 22 languages detecting a clear structure in the choice of stories covered by the various outlets. This is significantly affected by objective national, geographic, economic and cultural relations among outlets and countries, e.g., outlets from countries sharing strong economic ties are more likely to cover the same stories. We also show that the deviation from average content is significantly correlated with membership to the eurozone, as well as with the year of accession to the EU. Conclusions/Significance: While independently making a multitude of small editorial decisions, the leading media of the 27 EU countries, over a period of six months, shaped the contents of the EU mediasphere in a way that reflects its deep geographic, economic and cultural relations. Detecting these subtle signals in a statistically rigorous way would be out of the reach of traditional methods. This analysis demonstrates the power of the available methods for significant automation of media content analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the future of the journalistic profession in Europe. The author reflects on issues that promote the importance of journalism in Europe, including the right to the freedom of the press, the freedom of circulation and of the employment of workers that are members of the European Union. The converging phenomenons that constitute advances in the modes of information and communication, including the development of new technologies, patent deregulation and the overthrowing of the antiquated theory of informative sovereignty by national governments are discussed. The exercise of the future journalistic profession in the European community requires both professional and technical training, contends the author.