Polishing up the Commission’s image

Date: 05/09/1996

AUGUST is fondly known as the 'silly season' in British journalistic circles - and not without good reason.

For it is the time of year when newspapers, struggling to find stories while most of those who normally make the news are sunning themselves on the beaches of Europe, have a tendency to seize on anything which does happen and hype it out of all proportion.

This year was no exception, as journalists seized on every crumb of information about the performance of EU economies crucial to the success of the single currency project as evidence that EMU was doomed.

Whether it is or not is not at issue here. But the episode served once again to demonstrate the media's importance in shaping public attitudes towards Europe - and underlines the need for the Union to get its press relations act together if it wants to convey a different message to the public.

Yet, as European Voice reveals in a special report this week, the task of keeping the hundreds of journalists who now cover EU affairs on a daily basis informed of the Commission's activities falls to a band of just 21 spokesmen and women whose job it is to present the facts in the best possible light. Whether journalists chose to accept their interpretation of events is a matter for them. Informed and intelligent criticism of the EU when it gets things wrong plays an essential role in the debate about the Union's development. But the Commission is fond of blaming the media for its poor image in the eyes of the public, accusing reporters of twisting the facts to suit their own ends. While this is sometimes undoubtedly the case, the Commission has only itself to blame if it fails to arm itself with the skilled manpower needed to get its message across.

Much has been done over the past 18 months to improve the service offered by the Commission's porte parole. But the plain fact is that in an EU of 15 member states, with an accredited press corps of some 750 journalists, 21 men and women cannot hope to cope with the ever-growing demand for information and comment on the Union's activities. The workload borne by some of them is simply too heavy.

The result is that journalists' questions sometimes go unanswered until it is too late to stop misleading information being published. The time has come for the Commission to review the way it handles press relations and provide the resources needed to ensure that all inquiries can be dealt with fully and in good time. Only once that has been done might it have grounds for blaming the press for some of its image problems.