263). In Russia, news media is increasingly characterised by intense commercialisation pressures, leading to media doing “the bidding of sparring elites in return for financial support” (Lowrey & Erzhikova, 2011, p.275). Yet, the media reality is more nuanced. In China, there is evidence that commercial imperatives are entering news media production in China (Tang and Iyengar 2011) challenging government interferences. India’s record is showing a growing disrespect to the media’s role as a ‘watchdog of democracy’. Stone and Xiao (2007) argued that Russian news bias in favour of its own post-Soviet government is now expected despite granted freedoms. Our study presents media framing of foreign counterparts both in primarily free media and controlled press countries. In the former, foreign news coverage serves as an “important source of information and a potentially powerful lobbying force” (Rubin 1979: 7) for local governments and also shaping voter’s preferences. Related to cascade activation in democratic systems, “the assumption is that an enlightened public will receive politically important information through the press and in turn will provide guidance to policymakers” (Larson and Chen 1992: 82). Even in controlled media news coverage is a “prime indication…of current political attitudes” internally and externally (Rubin 1979). In addition to ‘internal’ factors influencing news coverage, external political structure is also important. Alleyne (1995: 6) noted that ‘the global flow of news is political: it reflects and determines the international configuration of power’. China, India and Russia are ‘emerging’ powers, competing with the EU and the US for superpower status and contemplating their responses to the changing international realities (e.g. EU’s growing economic crisis), as well as calculating its effects and impacts. While the three ‘emerging’ powers differ in many geo-political terms, the three are united by ‘strategic partner’ status in their bilateral relations with the EU. Neither a federation, nor a pure intergovernmental organisation, the EU is constantly changing, often fundamentally. The EU’s recent history has featured a set of ongoing crises – financial, economic, social, political – all triggered by the euro crisis. What is commonly referred to as the ‘euro crisis’, is, according to Shambaugh (2012), three distinct crises. Since 2009 the eurozone economy has been crippled as
cultural resonance of frames. A frame that is not understandable and memorable is not successful in activating and spreading ideas within the “cascade activation” model. Table 4: Thematic frames of EU textual and visual imagery DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS Mass communication is “saturated with images” (Deacon et al. 1998: 185). In an increasingly visualized world, the visual informs our very first and most profound decisions (Gladwell 2005 quoted in De Vries 2008). Yet despite this, Deacon et al. (1998: 85) note that “[the] work on the visual dimensions of [mass] media remains relatively under-developed” and systematic insights into the intertextual relation between visual and textual elements are rare. This study attempted to address these scholarly deficits recognizing that while images do “offer… the actual witnessing of reality … [and] substantiate an objective record of what actually happened,” inevitably they also have to “catch up with the event, or rather the event as it has become a news event” (ibid). Positing its inquiry within “cascade activation”, this analysis re-emphasized the importance of visual images in framing. Entman’s mass communication theory is useful for tracking the interaction of visual and textual imagery in the context of the frames’ cultural resonance and assessing its contribution to the “cascading activation” of ideas. Intertextual relationships were assessed in terms of its creation of visible and noticeable, understandable, memorable and emotionally charged frames. These are credited with the potential for activating the spreading of ideas up and down the ‘cascade’ and with becoming a key contributor to the ‘selective, framed communications’ on foreign policy and international relations between different levels of the network – administration and non-administration elites, media and the general public – all operating with various degrees of cognitive limitations. While visual images are powerful in raising the prominence of news stories, our analysis exploring intertextuality in the degree of centrality and themes and evaluation, has demonstrated that the interaction between textual and visual elements in each category fails to produce influential news frames about the EU. During the euro crisis, the scrutinising eyes of the world have watched the EU’s reaction. No solution is clear, as Commission President Barroso (2011) acknowledged: “our citizens, the markets, and our partners in the world have not yet been