I am in Vienna, a guest of the Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, who, for their 25th anniversary, gathered a group ``Towards a European Public Space; International workshop on European media networking''. Mostly new serious media types, with a few academics (and some who were both) and one Commission representative, Habermas hovered over the day.
There was lots of really good material--Mark Hunter's combination of INSEAD hard-headedness with a career in investigative journalism; Jeremy Druker's description of TOL's training/editorial business model; Thierry Chervel, founder of the wonderful SignAndSight project, etc... I will have time to return to these.
Anja Herzog, an academic from Hamburg, starkly asked why there is no European public sphere. She had a clear answer:
- political institutions don't give people control at a European level, so why should they be informed about Europe as such?
- communication from the EU has been off-puttingly top-down
- politicians continue to present to voters in a national perspective, not a European one ("This is what Britain must do on Climate Change,'' for example, when policy and negotiations are a European matter.)
Jurgen Frieberger, the Commission's political reporter in Vienna, gave the same story from the EC's perspective with admirable candour:
- The citizens of Europe don't know enough about Europe
- We need to enter into dialogue with people
- We must end the political blame-game by which all that is bad comes from Brussels and all that is good comes from the national government. (Yana Genova, participant from Sofia, shared a wonderful micro-example: at Sofia airport, new customs procedures are presented in English as being ``Following EU directive ...''. In Bulgarian, passengers are told that ``New procedures have been imposed by the EU ...'').
Jurgen pointed us to the Communications DG Communication on Communication--cause for some proudly bureaucratic humour--for the full story. The document is made more interesting next to Jurgen's candid version, because of its more relentless positivity - there are no problems in communication, only opportunities.
But Anja and Jurgen in a way got to the hard question for applied Habermasians most directly: is the relationship between media and "Public Sphere'' like the one of Chicken and Egg, or is it more like Chicken and Sunday Roast? Let me explain ... If media and communications creates public identity, and common purpose creates media (the chicken/egg symbiosis), then there is no media magic sauce, no number of participative fora, that you can sprinkle on an institution to create an identity. If common interests and ways of life create the basis for shared communication (like chicken is the basis for roast), then journalists and editors must chase and serve existing communities and market niches, not build them. Final possibility - shared media creates the Roast of public identity - and we are in a case when the power of the media is so large as to be truly worrying.
These are rather polarised caricatures of the possibilities. But I actually don't know which is closest to being my belief. I certainly know that journalists chasing revenues--from advertisers or from foundations--will tend to argue the last, which gives media maximal power.
When the discussion of Jurgen's presentation turned to the problem of multilingualism, he pointed out that creating a truly multilingual forum was too expensive to do on most topics. I pointed out that this is exactly what the EU already does in the parliament, which shows it can be done. "But that would be too expensive! [for a web forum]'', he answered. My easy come-back was: "But how much is it worth?''
Well, if the spenders believed the last option, that communication creates the public sphere, the 2m Euro price tag (as someone in the audience estimated the cost) for operating the translation machine of the Parliament would be a bargain.
Instead, the EC is buying radio and television advertising space ...
