My vision of journalism in Brussels

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kittybwonderful/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In my opinion, there should be no independent journalism in Brussels.

The EU institutions just need to create their proper press corps which produces favourable news for them. In addition, they should fund a group of about 30 bloggers who pretend that whatever the EU institutions are doing is interesting. To do so, they will usually link and comment the news coming from the institutional press.

From time to time, the bloggers will write something critical. One or two EU officials will agree with them through comments or tweets. Thereupon, the bloggers will be invited by the institutional TV station (broadcasting live on air and on the web) for an interview.

In the interview, the EU journalists will make the bloggers weaken their opinion so that it can be taken up by members of the European Parliament to be introduced in the proper decision-making process.

Afterwards, the bloggers will have drinks at Kitty O'Sheas at the expense of the EU institutions and will start one or two creative projects when they are drunk. With these projects they can be invited to international conferences where they will explain technology and Europe to local freelance journalists.

The local journalists will not understand everything properly and so the bloggers can make fun of their newspaper articles the next day in their blogs. These articles will be used by the EU Commission as basis to continue keeping independent journalists away from Brussels.

You see: Nobody needs independent journalism in Brussels when there are bloggers and some good news products funded by the institutions - and I hope the EU institutions will soon have understood!

PS.: This blog post is the translated and slightly adapted version of a comment I made to a related article by europaeum on the current debate of declining numbers of journalists in Brussels. I had to write down this vision to make sure that everyone knows that we eurobloggers are against independent journalism in Brussels. It's us against them. And in the end, we will win.