Between journalism and Europe
In his column, Stephan Russ-Mohl criticizes journalists and the media for remaining stuck in a provincial mindset, even though (media) corporations and institutions have long since been operating on a global scale.
still no "European" journalism and also no
"European public"? When at the end of last week
Communication scientists from all over Europe in Amsterdam
came together to form the European Communication Association.
this was an opportunity to explore such questions.
After all, it is somehow grotesque: the large corporations have long been acting
global, the economic areas are growing together; the political
European integration is making progress, political power is shifting
and also media companies such as Ringier,
Bertelsmann, Springer, Schibstedt, Pearson, Mediaset or the
WAZ Group have become transnational players. So why
Journalism and the media have not also been Europeanizing for a long time.
Public?
In our search for economic explanations, we came across five filters
are pushed together. They work together, and the vicious circle that this creates,
can hardly be broken through for the time being: The first barrier is the
media industry itself - in the competition for viewing figures and
Circulation. The second filter is the audiences that the media industry
would like to reach. Their limited attention span makes it
difficult to overcome cultural and language barriers: Media are
Mass products. The majority of people are not polyglot Europeans,
but Swedes, Poles, French, Germans or Swiss. The media
are and will remain as local and provincial as the audiences they
want to achieve.
Filter no. 3 is the EU institutions. Like all bureaucracies that are neither
are not sufficiently controlled by parliaments or the media,
the Commission tends towards autism and its apparatus towards
Independence.
The latest studies by the Mediatenor Research Institute have once again
shown that the EU is largely below the level of public
perception threshold and, on top of that, negative evaluations
determine. So far, legions of PR experts have done little to change this.
can change. They undoubtedly act as a fourth barrier because they
want to control the flow of communication and therefore often
Cut journalists off from information.
The fifth and final filter is the journalists themselves - at any rate,
if they are also assumed to have vested interests and not the myth of the
in the interest of the bonum comune.
The statistics are only impressive at first glance: over a thousand
correspondents are accredited in Brussels - more than in any other
other major European cities and possibly even more than in
Washington. Only a small proportion of these journalists work
However, with media that have access to the decision-makers and can also
otherwise guarantee reasonable working conditions.
The few correspondents who work for the major news agencies
and working for the leading media in their home countries act as
the leading agenda setter among the Brussels correspondents.
In contrast, they always have to fight for space in their home editorial offices.
fight for their stories. They do this all too often and intensively,
they worsen their own working conditions in the
privileged niche.
A much larger proportion of correspondents consists of rather poor
paid freelance journalists who are dependent on a second income.
are. They hardly have time for in-depth research. As early as 1999
almost a third of them earned extra money in Brussels
through public relations work - and as boring as PR-based
reporting is often, the stories of many of the
Journalists.
Overall, therefore, there is still little hope for more and better
"European journalism" for an inquisitive "European
Public".
Stephan Russ-Mohl heads the European Journalism Observatory (www.ejo.ch) at the University of Lugano.
