A distant Europe

73% of the citizens of the EU-27 consider themselves badly informed about the activities of the European Parliament: the Eurobarometer finding formed the backdrop to a recent conference in Rome, promoted jointly by the European Journalists’ Association (EJA) and the European Parliament on “Europe and citizens: what information?”, in which European media experts, journalists and politicians participated. According to Michel Theys, director of Euro Media services, Brussels is the city with the largest presence of foreign correspondents in the world, surpassing even Washington. The journalists accredited to the European institutions are roughly 1100, and come from sixty countries. In the early 1980s there were only 300. “If European information is inadequate, the blame – said Theys – is not that of journalists, but of the dysfunctions within the news services of which they form part. To put it bluntly, many journalists do not know Europe, which with its regulations, its institutions and norms unmatched on the national level, seems like Chinese, so that if they don’t understand something, they prefer not to speak of it. That’s why Europe remains on the margins of information”. Public opinion confused. “The business of information still remains today a productive activity. It’s impossible to realize without an effort, and requires genuine intellectual mobilization. It’s an activity so noble as to deserve, in a democracy, time, money and attention on the part of citizens”. Information cannot be identified with “recreation” and “entertainment”: on the contrary, “it is a civic discipline whose objective is to form citizens”, said Athanase Papandropoulos, Honorary President of the EJA, in his speech to the meeting on “Europe and citizens: what information?”. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ratification of the Treaty of Maastricht and the adoption of the European Constitution, “today – observed Papandropoulos – Europe has entered a new phase in its history” and the role it plays is now “even more important than it was a short time ago”. In spite of this, he pointed out, we are witnessing “immobility on the part of our leaders and bewilderment on the part of public opinion, which is confused rather than indifferent. We are witnessing a lack of debate between the elite and the population and a failure to address the deficit in communication. Europe is now caught in a vicious circle, divided on its future within its 27 member states and yet faced by the need to re-value European integration in the eyes of its peoples”. For their part, “the media sacrifice communication to live coverage, to instant news, and thus reduce the time for analysis and reflection. Journalists react to events on the spur of the moment, instinctively abandoning the needs and guidelines imposed by their profession. The position of the journalist and the spectator become fused together; the gap between them disappears, and the citizen is absorbed into the event. Gradually the illusion grows that seeing is understanding. Such a conception of information leads to a worrying fascination with live images, with violent and bloody scenes. It’s a demand that encourages the supply of fake and manipulated news”. Evanescent image. “It’s not always easy, for a journalist, to speak of the European institutions whose activities “are often far removed from the daily life of European citizens”, said Maria Fernanda Gabriel, correspondent of Portuguese radio and television in Strasbourg. She especially criticized the politicians who tend “to make the EU pay the price of unpopular measures” at home or “of their own internal difficulties”. “The evanescent image of Europe in public opinion largely depends on the responsibility, or rather the irresponsibility, of the political class”, declared Gabriel. She especially accused the politicians of a “split personality”: i.e. when they approve particular measures in Brussels and then, once they have returned home, lament them “as if they were something extraneous to them”. Nonetheless, as Jack Hanning, former head of the Press Service of the Council of Europe, recognized, “in spite of everything, progress in information and in communication is undeniable. Europe’s leaders themselves have understood the need to involve citizens, because without their support it’s impossible to give rise to a democratic organization of Europe”. According to Hanning “Europe must stop being a treaty between states and become instead a real contract between peoples and citizens founded on European-wide scope for participation and construction. Civil society – he concluded – must be able to find in Europe its own scope to be able to contribute to and foster the European project”.