Commission counts cost of PR ‘own goal’

Date: 11/02/1999

With the relationship between the media and the European Commission at an all-time low, Gareth Harding looks at the war of words triggered by recent corruption claims

THE role of journalists is normally to write about other people - not themselves. But in the past few months, Brussels-based reporters have been subjected to such a stream of invective from European Commissioners at the centre of corruption allegations that they have become part of the story too.

Education Commissioner Edith Cresson has blamed the EU executive's current crisis on a "very, very, very vast campaign orchestrated by the German media", and dismissed the allegations levelled against her as being part of a "far-right, anti-Jewish plot".

Commission President Jacques Santer has complained of a conspiracy against him in the Belgian press and has threatened to take action against "a press cabal which tries to destabilise me". Meanwhile, two major legal cases have been brought against reporters by Commissioners.

But the most crude example of the institution's siege mentality surfaced late last month with the leaking of a paper on media relations from the Commission's Spokesman's Service.

Drawn up by Cresson's spokesman Jimmy Jamar, the internal memo attacked journalists for turning the Commission's press centre into a "bullring" and called on the International Press Association (known by its French acronym API) - which represents reporters' interests in the EU institutions - to regulate examples of "blatant misinformation".

Even more alarmingly for an institution which prides itself on its openness, the paper claimed that transparency was overrated and that "a dose of cynicism - and sometimes hypocrisy - is necessary in defusing information". Faced with certain "particularly cunning journalists", the memo concluded, the Commission must "learn to conceal information" and for the time being bite its tongue.

Shooting the messenger for bringing bad news has been a favoured tactic of those under sustained attack since the days of ancient Greece. But, in the modern democracies of western Europe, seldom has the press been criticised so openly and rarely has this abuse backfired so badly as in recent months.

Even some Commission staff privately admit as much. An internal paper written by one of the institution's more media-savvy spokesmen admits that it was a mistake to go on the warpath against reporters during last month's showdown with the European Parliament over allegations of fraud, corruption, cronyism and mismanagement in the institution.

"It is the number one rule in press relations: don't attack the journalists. The lawsuits just antagonised journalists and were a spectacular own goal. Challenge their interpretations, challenge their facts, but never attack them personally," warns the document.

The recent spate of actions against Brussels-based reporters, together with hints from chief Commission Spokeswoman Martine Reicherts that the daily noon briefings for journalists might even be suspended, has also enraged the API.

"Instead of helping to ease relations in the press room, the Commission's recent hostile actions vis-à-vis some journalists - has led to a worsening of relations with the press," warned the association in a recent statement.

German journalist and API board member Michael Stabenow, who has been writing about the EU for almost two decades, says that relations between the media and the Commission are now at an all-time low.

The EU's executive arm is furious with newspapers for drawing attention to highly damaging allegations of wrongdoing within the institution, whilst journalists are up in arms about being sued and attacked for daring to question the integrity of Commissioners.

The level of mutual suspicion has turned the Commission's press room from the cosy club of old into something more resembling the bullring described by Jamar.

Every day, journalists attempt to deliver a fatal blow to the weakened beast which is the Commission, whilst spokesmen and women try to fend off the worst of the damage by locking horns with the assembled reporters.

A press conference given by Santer a week before last month's censure vote in the Parliament provided a typical example of this.

Having made a bullish defence of the Commission's record over the past five years, the president was immediately subjected to a barrage of hostile questions about his wife's property dealings and his own personal finances. Instead of calmly responding to reporters' questions, a red-faced Santer retaliated with a mix of bluster and outrage that only served to encourage the journalists to press him even harder.

One spokesman said the handling of the press conference "just added to the impression of an institution at the point of meltdown". It also showed how unused to dealing with a hostile press corps the Commission has become.

"Until the early Nineties, investigative journalism was an unknown species in Brussels," said Hartwig Nathe of the German magazine Focus. "Most of the press corps, myself included, saw ourselves as fighting on the same side as the Commission to build up our common Europe."

However, when a new breed of more aggressive reporters arrived on the scene, Europe's unelected technocrats became rattled. Unused to such an onslaught, the Commission began to "systematically slander those journalists who dared to attack the untouchable", according to Nathe.

In an article entitled 'Europe needs its muckrakers', the German reporter has called for more "nasty investigative journalism" to expose the hypocrisy of senior Commission officials and prevent the squandering of public money by the institution.

"The Commissioners must be given the chance to look into the mirror and see something other than the cheap applause of those who surround them, with their fanciful flat-earth tales and fantasies about journalists in the pay of neo-Nazis and gangsters," he argued.

The Spokesman's Service has already begun a post-mortem into how it handled the media during the recent crisis sparked by the fraud allegations. Its conclusions will not make pleasant bedtime reading for Santer and his team.

A paper drawn up by one spokesman concludes that the Commission made just about every public relations mistake in the book as it tried to fend off criticism from an increasingly critical press and public.

Stories were denied, only to see those denials retracted hours later; messages were steeped in bureaucratic language which was "unconvincing" and "unusable" for journalists; and there was no integration of media liaison into the Commission's overall crisis management.

Furthermore, says the paper, "there was a systematic failure to take the press seriously, and a systematic failure to understand how news snowballs into a critical mass". As a result, the institution's 20 spokesmen and women were trapped into responding to their critics' agenda. "Day after day we were on the defensive, waiting supinely for the next attack," says the document.

In an interview published last week, Reicherts also admitted that the Spokesman's Service lacked coordination. "How can the Commission speak with one voice when at present we have 20 Commissioners with 20 spokesmen?" she asked.

One idea being canvassed is to reduce the size of the Spokesman's Service. Another more radical suggestion floated by Reicherts would be to appoint a Commissioner to speak for the institution.

Several memos on media relations are currently doing the rounds and will feed into a paper on how to improve the Commission's handling of the press, which will be handed on to Santer's successor.

All are agreed, however, on the need to train EU officials to deal more effectively with the media. "The Commission has a track record in appointing press officers who have no idea how to handle the press," said one spokesman.

The evidence of the past few months suggests that this conclusion is not far from the truth and that if the Commission is to dig itself out of the hole it is currently in, it is going to have to take both the media and its own image a lot more seriously.

Major feature on the poor relations currently existing between the Commission and the media.