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200 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

Table 9.1 Most frequently used EVN stories by day

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Maryland. Coders were fluent in the language of the newscasts they
coded. Each story was initially given a multi-word descriptor which told
what the story was about. After preliminary coding, each story about the
same persons/events was given the same, short ‘name’. In addition,
coders also recorded, among other things, the amount of time the story
received and whether it could be classified as ‘foreign’ news from the
perspective of the country on whose broadcast it aired (for a discussion
of the problematic nature of classifying news as ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’,
see Levy and Barkin 1989).
We begin our analysis of diversity and convergence in usage patterns
with Table 1, which reports on the extent to which the news stories
transmitted on the Eurovision News Exchange actually appeared on any
news program of the Eurovision member nations. Based on a day-by-
day examination of EVN usage reports for June, it appears that the most
heavily used story of any day was seen on a minimum of thirteen to a
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maximum of twenty national services. Similarly, the second most
heavily aired story of any given day during the sample week was used
by anywhere from eleven to seventeen national services.
For example, on 16 June, EVN footage of President Reagan’s
televised speech in which the President discussed a laundry list of items
including the economic summit, tensions in the Persian Gulf, talks with
the Soviet Union and the US budget deficit, appeared on newscasts of
twenty national services. That multi-subject story was the most widely
used EVN story of both the day and week.