"Europe" in Bulgarian News;

The present Master thesis focuses on the media representation of the European Union in Bulgarian TV and print news outlets. It employs qualitative content analysis to explore inductively the frames used in the news reports of Bulgarian media that concern the EU. The results indicate five emerging frames, three of which exist in previous studies, and two are newly emerging and country-specific. The most employed frame is the economic consequences frame, followed by two country-specific frames – the attribution of responsibility and the benchmarking frames. The findings are discussed on three levels of social and scientific relevance. The first level is the perceived communication deficit of the European Union, the second - the national economic, political and social specificities of a new member state like Bulgaria, and the last, the scientific level – the contribution of the thesis to the field of framing analysis in media studies.