The green pavilion, Euronews HQ, Lyon, 2015. Wikicommons/Lydie22.Some rights reserved.At the height of the euro crisis, media coverage didn’t exactly help to find solutions: it aggravated conflicts within the Eurozone instead. The then Belgian prime minister Yves Leterme cites the headlines in the German press in 2010 “where the Greek population on average were described as lazy people that only wanted to be on the beach, didn’t want to work. And although the performance of the Greek economy was very bad, to have popular newspapers in Germany portray Greek individual citizens as on average lazy was definitely irresponsible.” (The anti-Greek mud-slinging campaign by Germany’s largest newspaper, Bild, has been documented and analysed in detail.)
Of course European papers do not always peddle such stereotypes about other countries. But the fact remains that whereas we talk a lot about each other, we hardly communicate with each other in the media. The success of the Brexit campaign in the UK is a stark reminder of an all too often neglected problem: There is no functional European public sphere. That would for example mean that Greek and German politicians, economists and ordinary citizens would have been able to discuss their differences of opinion about austerity on a joint, unbiased platform such as one TV debate watched in both countries.
We know from our national experience how essential such discussions are in understanding each other’s perspectives, forming public opinion and holding our rulers accountable. But this does not happen in the EU. The perceptions of the same issue can be completely different in different EU member countries. European summits are a good example of the segmented European public spheres at work – with journalists usually sticking together in national groups and primarily attending their own government’s briefings.
