Why European newspapers
covers the EU the way they do
In the United States, a posting as Washington correspondent is an almost obligatory step if you want to become editor-in-chief of your paper. In Europe, on the other hand, being Brussels correspondent has hitherto been considered by media people to be less than interesting. Paris, London, New York or Washington are "real" postings. But Brussels? No.
The relative unimportance of Brussels can be seen in the way newspapers organise their articles and newspages. Where should one print the news from Brussels: on the Foreign News page, or Politics, or perhaps National News? The texts from the Brussels correspondent can end up anywhere, being more or less forced on a sub-editor who is not always happy to provide the space.
This might, however, be changing. The spring-cleaning in the European Commission together with the press-briefings in Brussels during the Kosovo war between NATO and Serbia suddenly made the Belgian capital one of the real news centres of the world.
Some journalists call the downfall of the Santer Commission the first "Pan-European" news story. It might be true. For once, the Brussels correspondents did not have to fight for space in their home newspapers. It probably also helps that former EU correspondents now can be found at the Foreign Newsdesk at the home paper.
Financial Times
People employed by the European Commission read the Financial Times. They also, in general, think that the FT has the best reporting from Brussels. Most of the correspondents in Brussels think so too, but not everyone.
– They never have their own news, they never investigate on their own, says a Brussels correspondent from a competing newspaper. If some Eurocrat wants to leak a piece of news, he calls the Financial Times, and they print it. They are like a Brussels call-girl service, only cheaper.
– But in general, the British papers are probably best in their reporting about European politics, says the correspondent. The articles in German papers tends to be like the Germans themselves: full, faultless and boring.
Some also mourn the demise of The European, a British newsweekly known for two things: a fresh tabloid design and low circulation figures. But it also had some of the sharpest political gossip written in Brussels. The folding of the paper has left a vacuum in the reporting – who is now going to be nasty and get the facts right?
Regarding other newspapers, there are critical voices among the employees at the European institutions. "Newspapers devote too much space to unimportant stuff, or small national questions, and forget the larger image".
The Big Issue
The enlargement of the European Union is very likely the biggest story in Brussels, but of that not many traces can be found in the press. And when the story is written, it is bound to be the national version, not the European.
As Karel Bertak, the correspondent for the Czech Press Agency, put it in an article for the European Journalism Centre:
– The German and Austrian press will analyse the impact of the free movement of workers from the East and will take sides in campaigns to allow the sale of land to foreigners in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia. Sweden, Denmark and Finland will follow closely the situation with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, lobbying probably for the admission of the latter two into the first group. The French may be more occupied with the competition of agricultural products while the Portuguese will brace themselves for the clash with cheap textiles produced in future new member states. The southern "Club Med" will continue to be vigilant about losing money, competitiveness and also about the shift of attention northwards, at the expense of their Mediterranean neighbourhood.
The analysis, in spite of being a bit old, still holds good. One can add that if the journalists could find a role independent not only of the European institutions, but also of their respective national governments' vested interests, the Brussels news could begin to look more like political reporting and less like articles from a sports event, with every reporter championing his/her own team.
The discussion of the "bigger picture" is mostly left to journalists and intellectuals in Eastern Europe, like Adam Michnik of Gazeta Wyborcza in Warsaw, Martin Simecka, editor-in-chief of SME in Bratislava, and Janos Kis, founder of the Alliance for Free Democrats in Hungary. In the EU member countries, this type of discussion is very rare.
National news
Le Soir, the leading francophone daily in Brussels, has a reputation for good reporting on European and Commission issues. De Standard and De Morgen, both Flemish papers in Brussels, have a more national focus, but good political writing. Otherwise, all calm on the home front:
– I think their experience in the two world wars has made them convinced Europeans, says one expat living in Brussels. They tried to go it alone in the lead-up to each world war, but it didn't do them much good.
But the biggest difference in reporting within the EU is to be found between countries like Portugal, Greece and Ireland on the one hand, and Sweden, Britain and France and the rest of the member states on the other.
Take Portugal, for example. One correspondent explains:
– Membership for Portugal meant a ticket to the world, a great leap from being a poor, obscure, fascist state on the fringe of Europe with an ongoing colonial war in Africa, suddenly becoming equal to other European states and actually getting a place at the big table in Brussels, the correspondent says. Hell, the EU subsidies even made them less poor!
– Greece had similar problems, with friendlier relations with the USA than with her European neighbours, and even Finland, with the economic crisis of 1989–90 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, needed to reorientate.
Finland succeeded, and nowadays wields an influence in international matters that impresses political analysts.
For the Irish, the European Union for the first time offered a route to the rest of the world that bypassed London (indeed, some of the regions in Ireland now avoid Dublin as well). Thus, Irish reporting about the European Union and its institutions sees everything through rose-tinted spectacles.
For the above countries, the question was not whether they were to give up their national independence to some foreign entity in Brussels, but how they could get out of their mess as fast as possible. Their newspapers reflected the positions of the countries.
Today this is even more obvious in the press of the countries in Eastern Europe hoping to gain membership in the near future; Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and others. To run an EU-critical piece in the papers in these countries is tantamount to treason.
The contrast to the British EU-bashing newspapers could not be greater.
– Any stick is good enough to beat Brussels with, says one member of the NUJ, the British journalists' union, in Brussels.
– Very few in the British press are pro-EU, except for some business-oriented papers, he says.
Hunting in a pack
How differently do the newspapers write about European issues? Take for example Tony Blair, the British Premier. Ever since he vaulted onto the international political arena at the Amsterdam summit in 1997, he has been treated as a superstar by every newspaper in Europe, from north to south, from right to left. Suddenly no borders, political or geographical, existed; Europe at last spoke with one voice – the voice of admiration, and, one is tempted to add, a total lack of critical analysis.
Granted that the European Commission has neither the political power of a national government, nor the cunning of the Blairite spin-doctors, it is still remarkable to see the same mechanisms at play during the process that led to the resignation of Jacques Santer's European Commission. Only, here it worked in reverse.
The newspapers of Europe once again spoke with one voice, but few bothered to present details about the report that led to the fall of the Commission.
That most of the fraud cases in the report of "The Wise Men" dealt with the way funds were handled by the member states was a fact that surfaced in few newspapers. The villain was to be found in Brussels, not at home. And that the Santer Commission had actually started to clean up the worst examples of mismanagement was ignored in most articles.
The lack of analysis in the newspapers left gaping holes in the public discussion after the report of "The Wise Men" (who were not all male, by the way). In the report can be found proposals that, if adopted, would lead to a vastly expanded and more centralised Commission bureaucracy.
The alternative way, to open up the Commission to public scrutiny, and allow a certain amount of decision-making at lower levels, has vanished from the debate.
Suddenly the buzzword "transparency" is out, the new one is "control". That public, democratic control is best exercised through openness seems to be forgotten. Here, where the newspapers should have reported, they repeated instead.
Published in Euro Metro 1999
The relative unimportance of Brussels can be seen in the way newspapers organise their articles and newspages. Where should one print the news from Brussels: on the Foreign News page, or Politics, or perhaps National News? The texts from the Brussels correspondent can end up anywhere, being more or less forced on a sub-editor who is not always happy to provide the space.
This might, however, be changing. The spring-cleaning in the European Commission together with the press-briefings in Brussels during the Kosovo war between NATO and Serbia suddenly made the Belgian capital one of the real news centres of the world.
Some journalists call the downfall of the Santer Commission the first "Pan-European" news story. It might be true. For once, the Brussels correspondents did not have to fight for space in their home newspapers. It probably also helps that former EU correspondents now can be found at the Foreign Newsdesk at the home paper.
Financial Times
People employed by the European Commission read the Financial Times. They also, in general, think that the FT has the best reporting from Brussels. Most of the correspondents in Brussels think so too, but not everyone.
– They never have their own news, they never investigate on their own, says a Brussels correspondent from a competing newspaper. If some Eurocrat wants to leak a piece of news, he calls the Financial Times, and they print it. They are like a Brussels call-girl service, only cheaper.
– But in general, the British papers are probably best in their reporting about European politics, says the correspondent. The articles in German papers tends to be like the Germans themselves: full, faultless and boring.
Some also mourn the demise of The European, a British newsweekly known for two things: a fresh tabloid design and low circulation figures. But it also had some of the sharpest political gossip written in Brussels. The folding of the paper has left a vacuum in the reporting – who is now going to be nasty and get the facts right?
Regarding other newspapers, there are critical voices among the employees at the European institutions. "Newspapers devote too much space to unimportant stuff, or small national questions, and forget the larger image".
The Big Issue
The enlargement of the European Union is very likely the biggest story in Brussels, but of that not many traces can be found in the press. And when the story is written, it is bound to be the national version, not the European.
As Karel Bertak, the correspondent for the Czech Press Agency, put it in an article for the European Journalism Centre:
– The German and Austrian press will analyse the impact of the free movement of workers from the East and will take sides in campaigns to allow the sale of land to foreigners in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia. Sweden, Denmark and Finland will follow closely the situation with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, lobbying probably for the admission of the latter two into the first group. The French may be more occupied with the competition of agricultural products while the Portuguese will brace themselves for the clash with cheap textiles produced in future new member states. The southern "Club Med" will continue to be vigilant about losing money, competitiveness and also about the shift of attention northwards, at the expense of their Mediterranean neighbourhood.
The analysis, in spite of being a bit old, still holds good. One can add that if the journalists could find a role independent not only of the European institutions, but also of their respective national governments' vested interests, the Brussels news could begin to look more like political reporting and less like articles from a sports event, with every reporter championing his/her own team.
The discussion of the "bigger picture" is mostly left to journalists and intellectuals in Eastern Europe, like Adam Michnik of Gazeta Wyborcza in Warsaw, Martin Simecka, editor-in-chief of SME in Bratislava, and Janos Kis, founder of the Alliance for Free Democrats in Hungary. In the EU member countries, this type of discussion is very rare.
National news
Le Soir, the leading francophone daily in Brussels, has a reputation for good reporting on European and Commission issues. De Standard and De Morgen, both Flemish papers in Brussels, have a more national focus, but good political writing. Otherwise, all calm on the home front:
– I think their experience in the two world wars has made them convinced Europeans, says one expat living in Brussels. They tried to go it alone in the lead-up to each world war, but it didn't do them much good.
But the biggest difference in reporting within the EU is to be found between countries like Portugal, Greece and Ireland on the one hand, and Sweden, Britain and France and the rest of the member states on the other.
Take Portugal, for example. One correspondent explains:
– Membership for Portugal meant a ticket to the world, a great leap from being a poor, obscure, fascist state on the fringe of Europe with an ongoing colonial war in Africa, suddenly becoming equal to other European states and actually getting a place at the big table in Brussels, the correspondent says. Hell, the EU subsidies even made them less poor!
– Greece had similar problems, with friendlier relations with the USA than with her European neighbours, and even Finland, with the economic crisis of 1989–90 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, needed to reorientate.
Finland succeeded, and nowadays wields an influence in international matters that impresses political analysts.
For the Irish, the European Union for the first time offered a route to the rest of the world that bypassed London (indeed, some of the regions in Ireland now avoid Dublin as well). Thus, Irish reporting about the European Union and its institutions sees everything through rose-tinted spectacles.
For the above countries, the question was not whether they were to give up their national independence to some foreign entity in Brussels, but how they could get out of their mess as fast as possible. Their newspapers reflected the positions of the countries.
Today this is even more obvious in the press of the countries in Eastern Europe hoping to gain membership in the near future; Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and others. To run an EU-critical piece in the papers in these countries is tantamount to treason.
The contrast to the British EU-bashing newspapers could not be greater.
– Any stick is good enough to beat Brussels with, says one member of the NUJ, the British journalists' union, in Brussels.
– Very few in the British press are pro-EU, except for some business-oriented papers, he says.
Hunting in a pack
How differently do the newspapers write about European issues? Take for example Tony Blair, the British Premier. Ever since he vaulted onto the international political arena at the Amsterdam summit in 1997, he has been treated as a superstar by every newspaper in Europe, from north to south, from right to left. Suddenly no borders, political or geographical, existed; Europe at last spoke with one voice – the voice of admiration, and, one is tempted to add, a total lack of critical analysis.
Granted that the European Commission has neither the political power of a national government, nor the cunning of the Blairite spin-doctors, it is still remarkable to see the same mechanisms at play during the process that led to the resignation of Jacques Santer's European Commission. Only, here it worked in reverse.
The newspapers of Europe once again spoke with one voice, but few bothered to present details about the report that led to the fall of the Commission.
That most of the fraud cases in the report of "The Wise Men" dealt with the way funds were handled by the member states was a fact that surfaced in few newspapers. The villain was to be found in Brussels, not at home. And that the Santer Commission had actually started to clean up the worst examples of mismanagement was ignored in most articles.
The lack of analysis in the newspapers left gaping holes in the public discussion after the report of "The Wise Men" (who were not all male, by the way). In the report can be found proposals that, if adopted, would lead to a vastly expanded and more centralised Commission bureaucracy.
The alternative way, to open up the Commission to public scrutiny, and allow a certain amount of decision-making at lower levels, has vanished from the debate.
Suddenly the buzzword "transparency" is out, the new one is "control". That public, democratic control is best exercised through openness seems to be forgotten. Here, where the newspapers should have reported, they repeated instead.
Published in Euro Metro 1999
posted by Pelle at Monday, August 02, 1999
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