As divisive political ideologies in the era of globalizatin, contemporary nationalisms differ considerably from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalisms. They are fueled by the worldwide antinomy between the global and the local. Because nationalism is rooted deeply in different political cultures, nationalist biases affect the way journalists and media organizations select and present news stories about national collective identities and the national “others.” However, it is legitimate to expect that supranational developments will redirect selection criteria of news coverage toward a less parochial and more responsible attitude on the part of the press.

In this article, an effort is made to examine the positions of fourteen leading Greek newspapers, taking as a point of departure an earlier study on the Macedonian question and expanding it to include the interim accord between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. It is argued that in comparison to the past, we see an important alteration of the normative framing of the articles, from an ethnocentric to a polycentric approach. However, an analysis of the results also demonstrates that this shift does not reflect a deeper and permanent change in the nationalistic attitude of the Greek newspapers on the Macedonian question.