Towards a Pan-European Public Sphere? A Typology of Transnational Media in Europe

Abstract

The quest for a European public sphere focuses on the Europeanization of national public spheres as opposed to truly transnational spaces of communication. There are two good reasons for this approach, as pointed out in Chapter 1: transnational media are rare, and transnational media do not reach broad audiences in the same way that national media do. Nevertheless, transnational media do deserve closer scrutiny. This chapter will show that a multitude of transnational media have evolved over the last 20 years and that they do have a small, but significant and growing audience. Research on transnational media is underdeveloped, however, owing to the ‘methodological nationalism’ (Beck 2000a) inherent in much of the research on communication.