Friday 4 June 2010

The female Commissioners' communication under scrutiny

Journalist-blogger Prune Antoine is heavily complaining about the heterogeneous quality of the (female) EU Commissioners' press services.

For her series "Drôles de Dames" (see my post), Prune wanted to have short interviews with all female Commissioners.*

So while Prune is very satisfied with the press services of Hedegaard, Reding and Georgieva, she is very unhappy with the press service of Vassiliou, Malmström and Ashton, who are either putting her off or are not reacting at all to her requests.

Prune also regrets that Margot Wallström isn't there anymore - and I agree, in particular since I have the impression that with the new Commission the interest in a common approach to EU <–> citizen communication has been pretty much lost.

One should mention that Wallström's portfolio is now managed by Commissioner Reding who seems to be able to deal with the press (see above) but who doesn't show much interest in modern communication as her disastrous letter to the Commission web editors - which is basically a big fat "NO!" to social media communication - has proven.

So we have some way to go in the interaction between the EU institutions on all levels with journalists and citizens, both via traditional media and through new communication channels, an issue that I've been talking about with many people over the last weeks here in Brussels...

* The ones she got are a very interesting read, so interesting that they even got the attention of the well-read German feminist blog Mädchenmannschaft ("Wie macho ist die EU?"), for which I then took the time to translate the first interview given by Commissioner Reding into German (the interview has been published below the original German article).

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