Does Europe Come to "Save" Us or to "Scold" Us? An Analysis of the Media Discourse on EU Funds

The last Eurobarometer survey (August 2010) draws the attention of the European Commission on the need to communicate with EU citizens. Amid the economic crisis, people's confidence has decreased, while euro-skepticism has increased. Among other things, this shows that, in wire of the efforts undertaken by the Commission to improve efforts towards public communication, we still cannot speak of a European identity and, even less, of a European public sphere. Successive changes have been made during the 60 years of EU Communication, in attempt to bring Europe closer to Europeans ana win their support for the Commission's policies. It is the purpose of this paper is to identify and briefly resent these milestones in the evolution of what today we call "EU Communication" and analyse them in the context of a famous debate that has shaped the study of communication since its inception, that between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey We will then present the results of a research on the coverage of EU policies in the online media from Romania against this theoretical background.