f Telling the Greek Story of Europe and the Bull Trap: How U.S. Correspondents Attribute News Value to a Topic-Oriented Country’s Status Within the Eurozone’s Debt Crisis

With the Greek debt crisis unfolding and slowly expanding as an economic crisis all over Europe, coverage of this event was heavy and steady – not only in the Eurozone. American media were closely following the situation in Greece from the very beginning at the start of 2010. Similar long-term coverage of Europe has been rare in the new millennium which begs the question why this crisis became such a big continuous news story in the United States. In this empirical study, it will be argued that the status of Greece as a news topic has been elevated due to the ongoing crisis because it is topically connected and contextualized to a broader story of Europe’s economy. Thus, including topical and contextual considerations in the news factor country status seems necessary. This paper uses news value theories as its theoretical background and is based on qualitative interviews with several Europe-based U.S. correspondents.