WORK|OUT European Students’ Review

EUROPEANS WITHOUT VOICE

   | Peter Preston (London). If you’re a journalist, you feel it in your bones, a matter of conviction and instinct. You know that true democracy and the ability to report and comment independently fit umbilically together, inseparable allies. You know how important a free press can be. But what happens when the democratic construct we’re monitoring is too vast and too complex for any such interrogation? What are we to make of the new, still growing European Union?
   The Union is about democracy; indeed, the securing of democracy is the reason most frequently given as new states, from Lithuania to Slovakia, pass through the door. Romania and Bulgaria and (maybe) Turkey will be inside the walls sometime soon. What price the Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia — all of them eyeing Brussels’ waiting list? But then step back and ask yourself where media monitoring comes in.
   We have no television channel that covers our burgeoning continent as a matter of democracy. CNN and the rest do some of the news, some of the time: but their horizons are fixed from London or New York. They are, at best, outside observers. Some more European news channels (like Euronews) do a little better: but, again, their agenda is non-political, more a collation of train accidents, floods and landslides than grounds for political decision-making.
   Europe, in short, has no broadcasting voice. And what of its printed press? There are some great papers of investigation and interrogation around in all of the big EU countries, to be sure: but see how their interest fades when it crosses national borders. Democracy? El Pais will look after it in Spain, Le Monde in France, the Guardian in Britain —— and so on. But our reporting is still implacably rooted in our national preoccupations. The Strasbourg parliament is reported — if reported at all — in terms of local boys raising a ruckus. European summits are national dogfights with individual briefings which might as well come from a different planet. There is no defined democratic European space — and no European public willing its creation. We’ve constructed a crossword puzzle where we hold only a few pieces and know glumly that we can never make it whole.
   How does Estonia talk to Malta? How will Romania converse with Denmark in terms which build common causes — or uncommon understanding? Even the biggest countries can’t afford to keep correspondents in such spots. There is no consistent reporting and thus no effective monitoring. Brussels stands alone, a small fortress built on the marshlands of incomprehension and ignorance.
   It’s the bit that Europe’s founding fathers left out. We are building a great new edifice of freedom without a free press which mirrors and shadows that growth. We are turning our bureaucracies supra-national, but leaving our journalism stuck in a national rut. And the chicken and the egg rule again. There is no evident demand for such a fresh approach to reporting Europe because readers and viewers don’t see the connection. They don’t know what they’re missing. They look in upon themselves — after the last Strasbourg elections — with bemused boredom. They’re turned off — and journalism, fatally, has no means of turning them on.
   Where do we start? I’ve tried once, and failed, by aiming too high. This has to be ground up, built on individual contacts and individual enthusiasms. We have to start building our own public opinion, and the moment is now.

Peter Preston is former editor-in-chief of “The Guardian” and chairman of the International Press Insitute.