A Reporter's Guide to the EU

Sigrid Melchior, Stephen Gardner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317192817
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A Reporter's Guide to the EU addresses a pressing need for an effective, in-depth guide to reporting on this major governing body, offering practical advice on writing and reporting on the EU and a clear, concise breakdown of its complex inner-workings.

Sigrid Melchior, an experienced Brussels-based journalist, gives a detailed overview of the main EU institutions and explains the procedures for passing EU law. Interviews with professionals working for the EU, from areas including lobbying, public relations, diplomacy and journalism, are featured throughout the book.

Building on this, the second half of the book provides useful journalistic tools and tips on how to approach EU reporting. It identifies common mistakes in reporting on the EU and how to avoid them, as well as offering guidance on investigative reporting. Melchior also details how to work with information gathered and maintained by EU institutions, including their audiovisual archives, the Eurostat and Eurobarometer, which are invaluable resources for journalists and journalism students.

With few aspects of political life that remain untouched by EU decision-making the book demystifies the EU system and its sources, enabling professional journalists and students of journalism to approach EU reporting with clarity and confidence.

For additional resources related to A Reporter's Guide to the EU, please visit www.areportersguidetotheeu.com

Part I
Introduction

1
Introduction to EU reporting

A few years ago, I was covering a late-night EU summit. Just ahead of my print deadline, at midnight, the EU leaders agreed a compromise and presented a new set of figures. I compared the numbers to those I already had from an earlier stage of the negotiations and, in the rush, I miscounted. The headline of my article was something along the lines of ‘EU backs out on earlier promises’, while the midnight compromise had actually meant a bigger commitment.

The next day, I woke up to five missed calls from the Swedish prime minister’s press secretary. I called my editor at one of Sweden’s biggest dailies, prepared to get fired from my just-started assignment as their freelance correspondent. But he did not understand the gravity of my mistake. There had been no reactions from readers or anyone at the newspaper. Not a single person among tens of thousands of readers had picked up on the blatant error.

That is when I realized how lonely we Brussels correspondents are. Our articles fly off into space and never really land anywhere. If a journalist misplaces a comma in an article about national politics, he or she can expect to get a bunch of angry emails from people who claim to know better. This is rarely or never the case with EU stories.

All Brussels correspondents have these kinds of anecdotes. There was the experienced EU reporter who wrote about a government inquiry that had showed huge gaps in knowledge about the EU. Sixty per cent of Swedish political science master students could not name the two legislative bodies of the EU. The reporter wrote the right answer – ‘the parliament and the council’ – in brackets. Ironically and embarrassingly for her, someone at the news desk changed that to the factually wrong ‘the parliament and the European Council’. (The European Council is the EU countries’ presidents and prime ministers while the council consists of the EU countries’ ministers from the different policy areas.)

And there was the public service TV journalist from a non-EU country who called his editor from the Maastricht summit, in December 1991, telling him that the EU countries had plans for a common currency. OK, the plans were ten years into the future, but it was still huge news – this would become the single biggest transfer yet of national sovereignty to the EU, the power over the money printing presses. The feature the reporter made never got aired because the editor told him that it was ‘incomprehensible’.

Does it have to be boring and complicated?

EU journalism is caught in a vicious circle. Reporters and editors do not report from Brussels because people do not want to read about news from Brussels. The EU is considered boring and difficult. The most read articles about the EU are the jokey articles that are often far from the truth, such as Brussels bureaucrats conspiring to ban a popular sausage somewhere.

National politicians are not keen on shining a light on the EU. Talking seriously about EU politics does not win them many votes. In many countries, there is still controversy about the country’s relationship with the EU, and within some political parties the EU issue causes painful divisions. If the media does not report about the EU, and politicians don’t talk about the EU, how can the general public think that the EU is important and interesting? Chances are small.

Our readers consume news every day about our own national political systems and know the necessary basics. But when we write an article describing a precise moment in the EU decision-making process, we have to start from zero and first describe the fundamentals of how the EU institutions work. If the public had some basic knowledge about how the EU works, we could skip this admittedly boring part and write more about what is interesting: the power dynamics and the political values, for instance.

Since journalists do not write about the EU in a way that grabs the attention of readers, there is little public awareness about everyday EU matters. No TV series depicts the political power struggles in the EU; no hip hop song has ever been sung about the European Commission. Many European citizens know much more about the political life at the White House in the US than they do about Brussels. Only in the EU capital Brussels is there a critical mass of people who know enough about the EU to enjoy cultural representations of its political life. The Brussels opera house la Monnaie, for example, located the Mozart opera Mitridate, re di Ponto at an EU summit, in a representation in spring 2016.

‘The EU has decided’

Newspaper texts about the EU are often bone dry and full of legal and political jargon. Another, even worse, fault is that they are often simplified to the point of inaccuracy. All too often we write that ‘an EU report says’, ‘according to an EU proposal’ or ‘the EU has decided’, without explaining what this mysterious ‘EU’ is, without showing what role our national politicians are playing and without explaining whether the decision is final or if it can still be changed. Neither our editors nor our readers would accept such a lack of precision if we were writing about national politics.

This imprecise news contributes to the feeling that the EU is not part of ‘normal’ politics, that is, national, regional and local politics. Laws made at EU level are depicted as different and less important than those made at national level and the EU political process is shown as distant, cold and strange, even hostile.

I personally think that the ‘the EU has decided to’ line is often the result of the reporter’s own insecurity about how the EU functions. Rather than taking the risk of making a mistake, we use the all-inclusive concept ‘EU’. We cover our backs but we haven’t made our readers any wiser.

A large portion of what becomes national law in the EU member states has first been decided at EU level. We will cover how this is done in subsequent chapters, but a general, simplified outline is given here.

The three major EU institutions that take part in the law-making process are:

• The European Commission, which is the only EU institution that has the right to propose new laws (see chapters 4 and 7).
• The Council of Ministers, which is composed of the ministers from the 28 member states’ governments – if the proposed EU law has to do with agriculture, it will be the ministers of agriculture who negotiate the issue; if it is an energy matter, it will be the energy ministers (see chapters 6 and 8).
• The European Parliament, directly elected by the European citizens every fifth year (see chapters 5 and 8). The council and the parliament amend the commission proposal and, in the end, adopt the law.

One of my main points in this book is that it is seldom an adequate description to say: ‘The EU has decided …’ or ‘The EU wants to …’. It is only the European Commission that bears any resemblance to the mythological picture of the ‘EU elite’ in Brussels. The European Parliament consists of British as well as Polish, Portuguese and Finnish politicians, for instance, put on electoral lists by their national political parties and elected by their fellow citizens. The Council of Ministers is nothing more and nothing less than the sum of 28 countries’ governments.

Your politicians like to blame ‘the EU’ for decisions they have made

Politicians in all EU countries take credit for popular EU actions and blame the unpopular ones on ‘the EU’. But if we look at the general scheme of decision-making at the EU level, we see that no EU law can pass if the Council of Ministers says no. And in the Council of Ministers, each national minister has a seat at the table.

For some decisions, every country has the right of veto (see chapter 6). In those cases, it is technically impossible for ‘the EU’ to have decided something that your national government has not also agreed to. In other cases, the decision requires a majority vote. But even then, almost all votes are still taken with unanimity. Of course, nobody loves every detail of the law – it is after all a compromise between 28 governments’ different positions – but in most cases all countries’ governments agree that the compromise is better than the status quo.

The information jungle

National politicians can be blamed for passing the buck on unpopular decisions to ‘the EU’, but the EU institutions are, unfortunately, also unhelpful in making the EU understandable to the wide public. The EU institutions as a whole are miserably poor at communication, with the exception of some designated press people.

Web-wise, the EU institutions are a nightmare. When you research a story, you can often find all the background information you need on the different websites, but it tends to disappear in a flood of reports from the early 2000s, sections called ‘highlights’ or ‘news’ that are guaranteed to be the least interesting thing on the site, educational games to teach high school students how the EU works, and search functions that just don’t work. The worst is that nothing ever seems to be removed, not even information that with the passage of time and treaty changes has actually become inaccurate.

People working in the European Commission can seriously be heard saying, with pride, that www.europa.eu is ‘the world’s largest website’, not meaning the site with the most visitors, but the most crammed one.

The cumbersome communication set-up is in large part a reflection of the very construction of the EU. Every EU country guards its national interest. The EU institutions never compromise on diplomacy for communicative or aesthetic values, so anything that might be sensitive to one EU country is erased. And since there are 28 countries in the club, that means a lot of erasing. All the fun is glossed out. There are too many cooks in the communication kitchen.

Every EU country wants to make a cultural and linguistic mark in the union, and begrudges other countries choosing a name for new EU terminology. Therefore, the currency euro – pronounced with difficulty in several European languages – is not called the more beautiful and interesting acronym écu (European Currency Unit), which sounded too French for the British. In order not to upset anyone, most things are called something that starts with ‘EU’ or ‘Euro’, and everything that has ever passed through an EU institution comes out with yellow letters against a blue background.

Just compare the bland EU terminology to American political concepts such as the ‘Patriot Act’, ‘Fiscal cliff’ or ‘Budget Super Committees’. These are catchy terms that stay in the memory and that become popular cultural references. Many Europeans could explain the meaning of those American political terms. But how many of us can offhand explain the – to us at least much more important – difference between the European Commission and the Council of Ministers?

The EU institutions do not adapt their communication to what people outside the Brussels bubble know. For a start, they only communicate what their respective institution is doing. There is actually nobody who speaks on behalf of ‘the EU’.

Most people cannot tell the different EU institutions apart. They think of ‘the EU’ as one thing and their own country as another thing. But the way the people working in the EU institutions, including the press people, see the world is like this: the commission, the parliament and ‘the member states’.

Why is EU journalism important?

The fact that so few reporters scrutinize decisions taken at the EU level is dangerous to our democracies. For democracy to function, we all need to understand how, when and why political decisions are taken. How otherwise could we debate the political alternatives and hold our representatives to account for their actions?

The media is a crucial link between political power and the citizen, with the power and responsibility to investigate, explain, put news into context and expose. At the EU level, this unfortunately does not work. Citizens are severely under-informed about political issues that are decided at the EU level and that affect their lives much more than many of the issues decided nationally that get much more reporting.

In 2009, the Lisbon Treaty came into force, transferring a sizeable chunk of political power from national governments and parliaments to the EU level. Around the same time, the financial crisis and the euro crisis led to a series of quick decisions that in combination created a new economic–political architecture in which Brussels wields ever more influence over national economic policies. That the EU is important is not an opinion, it is a fact.

During the same period the newspaper crisis also reached new peaks. Many media let go of their expensive correspondents in Brussels. Their shoes were filled – if at all – by freelance journalists.

Brussels-based reporters tend to cover the big stories: the EU summits; major votes in the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers; and big decisions and legislative proposals from the European Commission. On top of that, they often serve as a sort of Europe correspondent, rushing to Paris to cover a terrorist attack and to Italy or Greece for the latest refugee tragedy. They often do not have time to cover the many steps of the EU legislative process to give the readers the same level of coverage as they would for an equivalent law passed within their home country – this would not be possible even if there were two or three times as many EU correspondents. The only solution to giving EU questions the attention they deserve is for both generalist and specialist reporters to start incorporating the EU into their everyday reporting, because there is hardly any part of political life today that does not have an EU dimension to it.

2
A few tips and tricks to get started

Subsequent chapters deal with how to find information and sources in the different EU institutions and how to write about the EU. But first, let us begin with some general tips to get started with EU reporting.

There is no central EU press office – keep track of three EU institutions plus your government

If you want to be sure not to miss any important EU news, you need to keep an eye on the three main EU institutions: the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers. You also need to keep track of your national government through its permanent EU representation in Brussels (and maybe those of the other main EU countries too).

There is a common website for press releases and calendars for all the EU institutions, including those that are tiny and almost completely unknown: the EU’s online newsroom. It is a good starting point to get an overview of what is going on in the different EU institutions. The EU TV channel Europe by Satellite, EbS, is also good for keeping track of major events. Many Brussels-based correspondents use the TV schedule as a calendar.

The EU institutions represent different aspects of EU ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Introduction
• PART II The three main EU institutions
• PART III Decision-making in the EU
• PART IV Other EU sources
• PART V Practical EU reporting
• Glossary
• Index