Endangered species: or how the news pack are vanishing from Brussels
By my reckoning, at this rate in 2020 there will be hardly 180 journalists left here in Brussels -- and every one of them sunk in what Cole Porter used to call 'the old ennui.'
Certainly there was a different feel to the place in 2005. Then the Eastern European countries had just joined the EU. There was plenty of curiosity -- and apprehension by the French -- about how these new countries would change the power structure in the European institutions. (So how much did they change it? Not much.
As de Gaulle said in the 1960s, 'Europe is France and Germany, everything else is just trimmings.')
In 2005 I was living in an apartment next to the Ecole Militaire, so had to endure hours of the Belgian army band marching up and down practising Beethoven's Ode to Joy (the EU's fake anthem). The band wanted to be ready for the the big-wigs who were expected to pour into Brussels when the European Constitution was ratified. The French and Dutch voters put a stop to that. Or at least, a stop to that until the constitution was cross-dressed as a treaty.
It was all very underhanded and dishonest around Brussels five years ago. But at least it was interesting, in an enraging sort of way. Now the EU, as far as financial issues goes, is just as ever France and German with the rest of the member states no more important than a parsley sprig on the side.
Every other issue is only a slog of in-fighting over who gets what spoils under the new Lisbon Treaty arrangements. Well, that and the ever-encroaching details of an ever-closer-union, but the Press, and the people, are inured to that.
Who really needs to pay to establish a correspondent in Brussels to cover any of it?
Lorenzo Consoli, president of the International Press Association, has responded to the figures with a letter written to the European Voice weekly newspaper. He says his association 'considers this an indication of the diminishing importance of Brussels for European media.'
One thing putting journalists off is that 'the European Commission, in particular, gives too little background information about decision-making, only details of the finely tuned results.'
The Commission, as part of its gazillion-euro propaganda budget, pumps out plenty of 'information' of course, with live television transmissions, and broadcasts over the internet, travelling shows, the lot -- but it is all just propaganda. Genuine information is tough to get out of any of the European institutions. Any official who leaks the real deal of what's going on can face persecution, smears and finally dismissal from his job.
So if the eurocrats want to know why we are finding them increasingly uninteresting, the answer is that they are becoming increasingly like the staff of the old Soviet Politburo. A one-party state never produces good news stories. Well, not 'til the shooting starts, anyway....
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