Articles:
An Open Letter to European Media

Dear editors,

We recognize, don’t we, that Europe — the countries of Europe,
the European Union as an entity, the very idea of Europe — is facing the worst collective threats in
living memory? These crises — of economics, of public finances, of
migration and refugee flows, of the multiple security threats around our
borders and even inside our countries — are shared across the continent. But is the European media doing a proper job
reporting, analyzing and reflecting the shared, cross-border, cross-cultural
nature of those crises? As a former editor of a European
publication myself, I don’t think so.

Too often, today’s European media — and the British are the
worst culprits, but not the only ones — has been pandering to narrow, national
interests and prejudices, and
failed to explain the true nature of what has been going
on. Worse still, some of the media — and here the British are true
pioneers — has been conniving in the efforts of
nationalists and anti-Europeans to close down the debate, to muzzle honest
reporting by discrediting inconvenient views, and thereby choking off that most European, and
quintessentially British, value of freedom of information and expression.

This is harsh, I know. You’ll hate me for saying it. And sure, there have been notable exceptions to
this sorry story. But overall, just when our citizens needed fair, balanced
accounts of what was going on — whether that be
the eurozone debt crisis, the war in Ukraine or the refugee and migration
flows across and around the Mediterranean — and accounts that helped them to
compare the situations of other EU countries with their own and sought
to learn from the differences, too much of the European media
failed them. Chiefly, the media failed their readers and viewers
by not recognizing that they are European,
rather than
simply national.

This is not dreamy-eyed Europeanism. I hope no one who has ever
read the Economist would think of me as a dreamy-eyed or any other sort of
European idealist. Those who drafted the supposed EU constitution only to see
the Economist say it should be consigned to the nearest waste bin certainly
wouldn´t.

Today’s situation saddens me deeply, more as a journalist
than as a Europeanist. After all, I began my career at the Economist 35 years
ago as a junior in the Brussels office, and spent the subsequent two and a half decades
devoted to international reporting and analysis, the last 13 years of which as
editor-in-chief, until I left in 2006. By analysis, I mean journalism that seeks out common strands and
experiences between countries while also learning from the differences. When shared
crises erupt, it seems to me only natural that journalists and their editors
should seek those pan-national, cross-cultural characteristics in their
coverage.

My dear editors, can you honestly say that
that is what you have been seeking and publishing? It seems to me that too many
of you have been hunkering down behind national borders, determined to see each
crisis through a domestic lens, pandering to domestic politics. Obviously, such
lenses, such domestic political pressures, cannot be ignored. But our job as
journalists is surely to put these pressures in a wider context, to illuminate
our national debates and preoccupations by drawing on international
experiences. That is what too much of the European media has failed to do.

I certainly saw this sort of parochialism last March in
Britain, so boastful of being the land of free expression, when the documentary
“The Great European Disaster Movie,” of which the Italian Annalisa Piras was
director and I was executive producer, was aired on BBC4. It is, admittedly, a
polemical docu-drama: It is about
the way in which the multiple crises of today’s Europe have
developed; about the reaction to them in countries as disparate as Spain,
Croatia, Sweden, Germany and of course Britain; and about how they could lead
to the collapse of the European Union. What it got in return was polemics heated up to boiling point,
with anti-EU papers rushing to discredit the film by labeling it as pro-EU
propaganda. The rest of the British media stayed virtually silent, seemingly
cowed by the Euroskeptic onslaught.

Such a response was rather surprising, as we understated Brits
say, given that the documentary is highly critical of many of the
EU leadership and the policies it has been following. Our
sin in the eyes of the Euroskeptics, it seems, was to say that the EU is
nevertheless worth saving and reforming. That was the proposition they, with
media connivance, sought to muzzle or discredit.

This is scarcely promising for the debate that Britain will need
to have about Europe during the run-up to its referendum on membership in 2016 or
2017. More broadly, though, it reflects an impoverished attitude to free speech
and information that has spread to many European countries as nationalist
tendencies have resurged.

Can you, fellow editors, do more to reverse those trends? I very
much hope so. Since I no longer have the privilege of a
weekly platform, I am trying a different, more bottom-up approach. Annalisa
Piras and I are launching an effort, through our small educational charity, The
Wake Up Foundation, to generate a pan-European conversation and to help foster
the cross-border, cross-cultural awareness that we think has been lacking.

Calling our initiative Wake Up Europe!, from next week onward we will be giving our film away for free to anyone able and willing to assemble
an audience, hold a post-screening debate about the future of Europe, and share
some of the ideas and conclusions with us. My hope is that people from
every European
country will seize this opportunity and run with it.
Europe badly needs to think, to talk — and to act.