Mad scramble for the bar

Date: 23/11/1995

The Commission's “Europe by Satellite” information service is “part of the ongoing policy for greater openness and transparency”, according to a recent hand-out. So why is the daily noon briefing for the accredited Brussels-based press corps 'scrambled' to make it inaccessible to all but the appropriate Commission services? To save journalists' jobs, is the correct answer.

The service was launched in September for television companies to tap into a Monday-to-Friday diet of live and pre-recorded Commission and EU news. Anyone else can pick it up too, if they have a Eutelsat 11 F2 at 10 degrees east; Transponder 21; Down link frequency 11,080,000 MHz; Polarisation horizontal; Video deviation 19 MHz/Volt; Audio sub carrier 6.60 MHz, 75 μs pre-emphasis; Audio deviation 300 KHz pp; Wegener Panda 1 Subcarriers 7.02, 7.20, 7.38, 7.56 MHz. And who hasn't?

Only the noon briefing is encrypted, to ensure that the accredited pack of scribes always get the news first and are not scooped by their own offices in other parts of Europe, watching proceedings as they happen via their dishes (for technical details see above). If that happened, news outlets might start to question the need to keep correspondents within striking distance of the Breydel at all. Apart from anything else, catering profits from the bar would suffer.

But there is a bit of confusion over what should and should not be encoded: a recent Franz Fischler briefing was beamed across Europe, although one spokesman was a little surprised to learn it had not received the 'spy' treatment. “It doesn't really matter,” he said philosophically, adding wryly: “Everything I say is scrambled anyway.”