REPORTING ABOUT THE EU

Source:  Reporting the EU News, Media and the European Institutions by John Lloyd and Cristina Marconi

"The European Union occupies a central position in the politics and economic life of its 28 Members and an important one in much of the rest of the world. Few other institutions of governance have such a contested role, and its very existence is increasingly called into question by uncompromising critics, while a growing constituency want it radically reformed. A debate on the legitimacy of the EU’s action has always existed and has been quite trenchant in the past, but it has never reached the current level. The EU public has never been so engaged with and opinionated about the EU project as it is now and the news media have to take this into account.

It is clearly important that citizens from the 28 EU countries understand what effect the EU Commission, the Parliament, and the Council of Ministers have on their lives – what policies they discuss and approve, what relationship they have with national governments, what assistance they offer to the Member States, how much they pay to them, what power they have and what powers they seek to have.  

Even after the crisis broke, the coverage remained patchy, and in some cases suffered from a lack of understanding of the issues and mechanisms under discussion, and/or a lack of sufficient staff to give more than a sketch of even critically important issues. On the other hand, the amount published about and by the European Union is vast. The Union’s institutions are lavish with news announcements, with briefings, with prepackaged but often detail-rich interviews with Commissioners; think tanks in Brussels and in all the main capitals pour out analyses and advice; the many specialised journals and websites are knowledgeable, up-to-the-minute, and distant enough from their subject to be critical; the global newspapers and wire services continue to support relatively large and active bureaux, whose output enjoys a high reputation.

The problem is with the larger public which is only sporadically interested in politics and public institutions. In times of crisis or of important decisions, the attention reaches a peak, but in good times news coming from Brussels is the first to disappear from newspaper pages and from TV programmes. This is the largest problem facing the news media which have the responsibility of covering the EU: its very structure and mode of operation renders the task of engaging the general European public with it, in journalistic terms, difficult. The consequences of the general lack of interest in the EU – except at times of crisis, have brought a more critical, even hostile, attention than before – underpin much of the report’s findings. The problem of interesting a wide public has different facets.

The coverage of the EU is inherently difficult for journalism, above all for broadcasters and for popular papers. Most journalism has long assumed that it must woo the reader into the story told, since s/he reads or watches, usually, at leisure without any externally imposed need to do so: a few moments of boredom will mean a decision to move on. This is especially true of the most popular news medium, TV. It is difficult because the Union and its institutions – including, and sometimes most of all, the Parliament – are largely devoid of the dramas, confrontations, rows, large and well-known characters and issues which make up much of the political coverage within the nation states. Instead, the journalists must deal with (changing) officials who are mostly, and remain, unknown to most Europeans. The processes of the Union and especially the Commission are slow, complex, and hard to grasp by a layman; many of the issues handled are technical and detailed; there are constant and often opaque negotiations in the Council of Ministers which brings together departmental ministers and the European Council which unites the heads of state and government of the Member States, both of which meet in closed session and retain the largest power. Even news which significantly impacts on everyday life – a decision which can affect a community in a positive or negative way, and there are many – is delivered in different steps over an extended period, and it can take years before the measures enter into force. If on one hand this shows how carefully every step is taken by the EU authorities, on the other hand it is hard to retain wide interest in the enforcement of a decision taking place years after it has been announced for the first time. The Parliament especially – unlike national assemblies, where the actors are known and the dramas often vivid – has been hard to televise and often soporific.

The growing conviction among editors that news about the EU was unpopular with readers and viewers led to a shrinkage, during the 2000s, of the permanent correspondent corps based in Brussels and a greater dependence on coverage from the news media’s home base, or from other capitals, such as Paris. EU information depended much more on freelancers and fixers, a less expensive workforce which replaced the established correspondents. In addition, the crisis itself forced further cuts on the news media – leaving the worst-hit countries, which arguably needed the news and analysis the most, with a shrunken representation.

Most news organisations, when reporting the EU, produce coverage which is not aimed at Europeans, but at French, Dutch, Polish, and other national citizens. The subtext is: what is the EU doing for, and to, us? Journalists, who find themselves assigned to cover the EU, or ‘Europe’, thus do what seems to come naturally: they bring their nation with them. Most journalism from Brussels covers the central institutions of the EU with both eyes on the business of determining how far they act in or against the interests of the home country. To cover it in this fashion is, of course, to miss most of what these institutions do – jerking them into life in print, sound, or images only to judge how far they are useful to the national interest; who are the losers and winners, the opponents and allies; what the national ministers, especially the prime minister, have achieved at their meetings, with the content generally briefed to the national news media representatives by the public relations officials of the government in question.  ‘Europe’ thus becomes an adjunct to the nation, and is simply another chamber in which the latter ‘speaks to itself ’ – or a chamber which each nation can blame when something goes wrong. The exceptions to this rule are the transnational media – the global wire services, such as Reuters, Bloomberg, AP, and AFP; the global economic papers, such as The Economist , the FT, and the Wall Street Journal ; and – to a lesser extent – the global broadcasters, such as the BBC, CNN, and others. These organisations see their mission, and their business model, as providing coverage which has little or no national focus: ‘news from nowhere’.

The economic crisis has significantly altered the work of journalists who cover the EU. It has

• Forced them to keep up with the pace of a decision-making which was highly technical and complex. They had to undergo a steep learning curve and had their relative ignorance exposed. Most were not well versed in economics and finance, and even those who were could hardly understand, at least initially, the new debates, policies, and mechanisms which quickly reached an uncommon degree of complexity. They also had to translate a very complicated message into simple words, given that many of the decisions taken often directly affected their public.
• Encouraged many of them to shift the focus of their reporting from the Brussels/Strasbourg centres to other cities in Europe – especially Athens (for the riots), Berlin (for the decisions), and Frankfurt (for the European Central Bank).
• Widened the gulf between them and the EU, especially the Commission, since it came to seem less relevant to addressing the crisis and its communications were constrained by the market sensitivity of the issues.
• Created a genuine and unprecedented interest among the public looking with concern for fresh and reliable news about new taxes, austerity measures, welfare cuts. Viewers and readers became increasingly demanding, but increasingly sceptical too.

Journalists covering the EU now see it as undergoing a series of changes unprecedented in its near-sixty-year (since the 1957 Treaty of Rome) history. The strains put upon it by the economic crisis have, at least in the first moment, encouraged many politicians and officials to point the way to ‘more Europe’ – a much greater fiscal coordination at the centre of the eurozone, both to address the continuing problems in many of the eurozone countries and to give the euro the political backing it has lacked since its invention in 2000. Then, quite abruptly, the political narrative surrounding the EU changed and ‘more Europe’ became, in many quarters, suspect. The centrifugal pressures have never been so evident, and the popularity of the anti-EU parties in several countries brought into the Brussels Parliament groups of parties, of the far right and the far left , who agree on one big thing – much ‘less Europe’ for many, the ideal for most of these being no European Union at all. This happened both in Southern countries as a protest against the austerity measures, and in Northern countries as an expression of the malaise for, as many see it, having to pay for other countries’ profligacy. This means that, for the first time, the European Parliament has the potential for both real drama and a real debate about the most fundamental of issues: the right for the EU to exist. Politicians have been elected who have a reputation for being outspoken and populist, keen on starting controversies and using abrasive language, much more suited to television and popular journalism than the Brussels debate to date. This represents a temptation for media struggling to engage their public with the EU: it  makes it harder for reporters to attempt to explain the substantive decisions and policies under discussion in the Union.

For a journalism which claims to hold power to account and act in the public interest, it is likely to do little. For a journalism which wants to interest the people, it is a large step forward