About EU Communication - Part 1 (acces to full text documents)

Yesterday, Commissioner Frattini presented its legislative package on border management. I would like to take it as a starting point to look at some aspects of the European Union's communication policy.


The Commissioner's own spin

The concrete communication about the border management package started with the usual pre-information by the European Commission's press team to some top EU journalists. Those information were embargoed until yesterday 11:00 AM.

However, the emargo was broken by Commissioner Frattini himself, who apparently gave some interviews to Italian newspapers the day before the proposal was presented. This was critisised two times by journalists, at Frattini's press conference and then again at the the EC's daily press briefing.


Reporting on a summary of a summary of .... what exactly?

To be honest, this was rather an exception. The real problem of how the European Commission's proposal presented is the following:

Let's look at the Commission website: The front page featured an article summarising the proposal in four paragraphs. Then there is a link to a Citizen's summary which is a PDF document with a longer summary (BTW: the Commission used hearts as bullet points, not sure this is related to Valentines Day or is usual practice). The summary document ends with...

The full text of the proposal is on the Internet: http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/news/intro/news_intro_en.htm

Yet, when looking at the web address provided, there is no full text available. You find there the same press releases that are available in the EU online press room or via Commissioner Frattini's website.

A note on languages: Note that only the main press releases (which is the shortest, summarising again the three other ones) is available in all EU languages. All other information is in English only. Is it really that expensive for a Directorate General to translate 3 press releases in at least the three working languages of the Comission when it comes to one of the largest legislative proposals in the year? Or should we rather believe that this is done on purpose so that journalist in the member states just get the short summary provided by their respective national press agency without any incentive to look further at the proposal?

Finally, let's try the register

Experienced journalists of course know that the full text of the proposal will be available via the Commission's register of document. But wait: the listing for new documents today shows actually the link to the three full text documents doesn't lead to the documents but rather to a form called Application form for access to a document held by the Commission.

Come on, if Frattini really wanted a debate about the future of border control management and illegal immigration (and he mentioned that probably 5 times during his press conference) then he would make available the full text of the proposal immediately. Until then, we will only be able to speculate about the exact wording of the proposal, without the spin of the Commissions press service.

This is, what journalist should be worried about.