Thursday 27 May 2010

Useless propaganda on EuroparlTV

I am not totally against institutional media if they fill a gap that the old and new media cannot cover right now.

But videos like the one below are exactly the kind of institution propaganda that I don't want to see.

It's coverage without journalistic distance, critical reflection or political opinions. There is no real (temporal) context, the pictures are stereotype and the commentary is totally descriptive.

An MEP who writes a blog or tweets 3-4 messages a day can produce the same information density for much less money and with much more authenticity.



The institutions shouldn't waste money on such kind of pseudo-journalism - if the MEPs want to promote themselves they shall do so with their own funds!

4 comments:

Europasionaria said...

Oh come on, it's not that bad, is it?
There most definitely worse...
At least it's informative about what an MEP does and how they work.
The main problem is more that very few people watch Europarl TV. And those who do probably work in or around the EU institutions. So yes, there are probably more efficient ways to spend money.

Nosemonkey said...

I'm a fairly heavy-duty EU-geek, and I've watched Europarl TV what, twice? Three times?

From what I've seen (and heard), it's a nice idea poorly executed at far greater expense than it need be.

Julien Frisch said...

I follow their RSS feed of new videos (rarely anything interesting) and check their monthly press discussion to see what they say about the euroblogs but that's it.

Mathew said...

A good friend and ex-colleague of mine works at EuroParlTV, but I'm afraid I have to agree totally with Julien.

Partly because of the marginally useful content, but mostly because of it's tone, I think it flirts with the line separating communications from propaganda as much as the MEP flirts with the camera.