Media, Economics and Geopolitics

Project Information

MEGEO

Grant agreement ID: 101042703

DOI

10.3030/101042703

Project terminated on 31 October 2024

EC signature date 10 November 2022

Start date 1 June 2023

End date 31 May 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 496 833,75

EU contribution

€ 1 496 833,00

Coordinated by

RHEINISCHE FRIEDRICH-WILHELMS-UNIVERSITAT BONN
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MEGEO (Media, Economics and Geopolitics)

Reporting period: 2023-06-01 to 2025-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The MEGEO project, short for Media, Economics, and Geopolitics, seeks to integrate data from multinational traditional and social media sources to analyze the role of media reporting in shaping national and transnational policy discussions. Using data from the Joint Research Centre’s Europe Media Monitor, Eurobarometer surveys, public opinion polls, and individual household-level panel studies, MEGEO focuses on key domains of transnational relevance, including climate action, immigration, and organized crime. Amid rapidly shifting geopolitical dynamics, the project has been designed to evolve responsively, producing a suite of open-source data products to enhance transparency and accessibility. By systematically mapping media narratives and linking them with public attitudes and behaviors across countries, MEGEO aims to shed light on how media representation influences public perception, policy-making, and global cooperation.

The project addresses a critical gap in the political economy literature, where existing research on media effects disproportionately focuses on a few countries, limiting the generalizability of findings. MEGEO challenges this narrow focus by exploring how predominantly national media systems interact with global policy challenges, potentially creating frictions that undermine collective action. Its objectives include developing a comprehensive data resource measuring cross-border media representation, characterizing the influence of national media on transnational policy areas, and quantifying the economic and political impacts of skewed foreign media reporting. Leveraging complementary datasets like Eurobarometer and household-level panel studies enables MEGEO to analyze the interplay between media reporting and public opinion at multiple levels. Organized into three work packages, the project will produce a “Topology of Media Focus” across countries, investigate the dynamics of cross-border news dissemination, and assess the role of national media in shaping transnational politics and cross-border economic activity. Through its interdisciplinary approach, MEGEO aims to catalyze research at the intersection of media, economics, and geopolitics, informing both academic inquiry and policy development.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The first year of the MEGEO project saw significant progress across its core work packages, with a total of thirteen new research papers being circulated. These papers consolidate the PI’s research threads in multiple domains and align closely with the MEGEO work program. A major milestone was the development of a working relationship with the Joint Research Centre (JRC), gaining insights into the infrastructure of the Europe Media Monitor (EMM) and leveraging its API for data analysis. The team identified a consistent sample of media sources indexed since 2016, creating a dataset of nearly 1,200 sources and over 300 million news articles. This effort supports the overarching goal of developing a comprehensive and consistent data resource to measure national media reporting and cross-border representation, showcased through two key applications.
The first application, aligned with work packages 1, 2, and 3, examines global media reporting on natural disasters and its implications for climate change awareness and policy preferences. Focusing on over 135 million news articles, this study highlights systematic biases in cross-border media coverage, with visually striking disasters like earthquakes and wildfires receiving disproportionate attention compared to floods, droughts, and extreme temperatures. This bias, influenced by disaster death tolls and the strength of social ties between countries, impacts public awareness and global solidarity. A second effort focused on harmonizing secondary data sources, particularly Eurobarometer surveys, standardizing questionnaires to enable integration with media data. Complementary research explored how large language models (LLMs) combined with tailored EMM corpora can analyze social and economic phenomena, such as filtering narratives for policy evaluation. A standout example is the project leveraging LLMs to map econometric results into narratives, aiding policymakers in assessing the validity of lobbying efforts. Adjacent work investigated the political expression of academics on social media, linking their latent political dimensions to societal perceptions—a study conditionally accepted by Nature Human Behavior.
Work Package 2 expanded on the PI's prior research in input-output relationships with applications in trade policy, supply chain resilience, and geopolitical risk assessment. Another major strand examined narratives around Brexit, using EMM data to measure the strength of local narratives and their economic impacts. Across all work packages, MEGEO has advanced both the technical capacity and scientific understanding of media’s role in shaping perceptions, policies, and global interconnections, laying the groundwork for impactful outcomes in addressing transnational challenges.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The MEGEO project has achieved significant results that push the boundaries of current knowledge and methodologies in media, economics, and geopolitics, creating transformative opportunities for research and practical applications.

Innovative Use of AI for Content Classification and Analysis
The Social Media Academics project leveraged large language models (LLMs) to analyze the latent political dimensions in online expression at scale.

AI-Generated Production Networks (AIPNET)
AIPNET uses advanced retrieval-augmented generation techniques to map over one million input-output relationships. The dataset has seen broad uptake from policymakers, trade experts, and the private sector. This is a state-of-the-art tool for studying supply chains, geopolitical trade tensions, and global economic resilience.

Event-Level Analysis of Media Coverage on Natural Disasters
By combining media coverage data with event-level characteristics, this study revealed systematic biases in how disasters are reported.

Real-Time Analysis of Economic Shocks
The work with high-frequency linked microdata can support agile policy-making in response to crises, such as the energy price shock.

State Capacity and Informational Boundaries
The Informational Boundaries of the State project introduced a new theoretical framework for understanding how governments’ informational capacities shape their responses to crises.

There are numerous areas for further development, improvement and disemmination given the current geopolitical situation.

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