Across time and space: explaining over-time and cross-country variations in the coverage of European elections

News about the European Union (EU) looks different in different countries at different points in time. This paper investigates explanations for cross-national and over-time variation in the news media coverage of EU affairs. The paper draws on large-scale media content analyses of newspapers and television news in EU-15 (1999), EU-25 (2004) and EU-27 (2009) in relation to European Parliament elections. It investigates predictors for variation within and change between the coverage of these elections. It focuses in particular on explanatory factors pertaining to the country, the media, and the political elites. Results show that national elites play an important role for the coverage of EU matters during European Parliament election campaigns. The more strongly national parties are divided about the EU, the more visible the news is, the stronger the increases in EU news visibility are, and the less European-focused the news is. The implications of these findings for the nature of public opinion about the EU are discussed.