The European Union membership issue on TVM's prime time news bulletins

Abstract

This dissertation aims to research TVM' s coverage of the European Union Membership issue on its prime time news bulletins during the month of November 2002. In November, formal negotiations between Malta and the European Union were being concluded. This dissertation attempts to examine state-owned TVM' s decisions on what issues to cover, what sources to give most importance to and how much airtime to allocate to each source throughout the EU campaign. It also aims to analyze a number of factors such as news value, repetition and propaganda in the highly political content that features predominantly in the local news bulletins. An outline of the principles of news value is given in Chapter 7, whilst chapter 3 dwells on the ethics of journalism. Chapter 4 discusses political communication.

The research approach adopted throughout this dissertation is a content analysis one. This research approach allows the examination of the issues and sources featuring in EU-related news stories. It also allows the interpretation of other important factors, such as the length and the positioning of the stories. A breakdown of this methodology is given in Chapter 5. The analysis of the EU-related news stories in TVM's prime time news bulletins broadcast during November 2002 is given in Chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 8 discusses an interview with TVM's News Executive Mr. Emmanne1 Zammit.