FRAMING THE EURO CRISIS IN THE ROMANIAN ONLINE MEDIA

EU-related topics rarely set national media agendas. However, European important events, such as elections, summits, treaties, etc. make good opportunities for raising Europe's visibility in the news. The global economic crisis and the Euro crisis became prominent topics in the Romanian online media, especially during two critical events, which have determined Romania's response to the crisis. In the context of the actual crisis, scholars pay more and more attention to how European issues are approached, made visible, and framed by the national media. So far, most of the research was focused on Western countries, such as UK, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. However, little is known about how the Euro crisis is actually covered by news media in the EU's new member states, such as Romania. Our research consists in a content analysis performed on the most visible Romanian news portals - hotnews.ro, and ziare.com. The analysis is focused on two important moments related to the economic crisis: 1. the signing of the first financial agreement between Romania and the International Monetary Fund at the beginning of May 2009, and 2. the organization of the Euro Summit for saving the Euro Zone at the end of October 2011. These events are not chosen arbitrarily, as they mark the peaks of the economic crisis, at least as far as Romania is concerned. A total of 11.570 news items were content analyzed in order to understand the visibility of the European topics, and, more importantly, the frames applied by the Romanian online media when approaching the crisis. Our findings show a relatively high visibility of the crisis during both periods; they also point out to two general frames that seem to shape online media's discourse on the crisis: the economic consequences frame and the responsibility frame. The economic consequences frame was predictable by the very nature of the topic covered. However, a similar weight given by the media to the responsibility frame shows that the European crisis and its local/national implications were discussed in terms of finding the actors accountable for the crisis and of identifying the appropriate measures for tackling the crisis. The conflict frame had a medium prominence in the news, whereas the human interest and morality frames were almost absent. Three issue-specific frames were also analyzed (powerlessness, paradigm change, and conspiracy), none of them being as visible as the two general dominant frames, albeit we identified several key moments when these frames are even more prominent than the dominant ones. Most of the papers published on the economic/Euro crisis are mainly focused on the economic side of this story. Our paper aims at bridging the gap between the economic perspective, on the one hand, and the sociological view, on the other, its final purpose being to formulate complex, yet pertinent, explanations about how the crisis is actually addressed in the Romanian online media.