Perceptions of Europe in British and Italian TV news programmes

The present paper focuses on the way Europe is construed in a corpus of British and Italian TV news programmes. We focused of TV news programmes rather than on print media since, according to a Eurobarometer report (Eurobarometer 55, 2001), 67% of EU citizens use television as primary source for information about the EU. News programmes were collected and orthographically transcribed from TG1 and TG5 in Italy at 20h00, and BBC1 at 18h00 and ITV1 at 18h30 in the UK from 12 February to 6 April 2007, as part of the IntUne project. Starting from previous studies focusing on the structure of TV news bulletins (Haarman and Lombardo 2009), a specific XML annotation was added to the texts in order to encode metadata relative to source, date, the structure of news stories and speaker information in order to make use of contextual information in the interpretation of linguistic data available through the corpus. The use of comparable corpora provides the means to carry out an analysis of media texts, building models bottom up from data rather than starting from a hypothesis, while still being able to look at the contexts of culture, the environment in which the text was produced, and the context of situation, the immediate environment of the language in use. This enables the researcher to generalise from the data whilst keeping in mind the dangers of making broad assumptions from a single textual context. Bearing these methodological premises in mind we analysed all the occurrences of Europe/Europa in the two subcorpora, highlighting how the term is highly polysemous shifting from a geographical space to a political, historical, and cultural unit. The analysis makes it possible to compare the differing perceptions of Europe reflected in British and Italian TV news programmes.