Brussels is home to the largest concentration of foreign correspondents in the world. Of the 1200 journalists accredited to the EU institutions, 1000 are non-Belgian – including over 120 from Germany alone. By comparison, there are only 20-30 German reporters based in Washington D.C, Brussels’ rival for the title of ‘foreign correspondent capital of the world.’
In the European Commission’s cavernous press theatre reporters from every corner of the globe swap stories, clamour for news and besiege spokesmen and women at the midday briefing. There are correspondents from regional Spanish radio stations, Japanese dailies, Chinese news wires, Slovenian TV stations and German investigative weeklies.
The only journalists you won’t see wandering the corridors of power in Brussels are correspondents of national American newspapers and TV channels – for the simple reason that there aren’t any.
Usually, journalists will follow power and money. Brussels has both. The EU is the world’s biggest economic power, trading bloc and aid donor with nearly half a billion people, an increasingly muscular role on the international stage and an annual budget of over €100 billion. Several miles up the road, NATO is the most powerful military bloc on the planet. At its drab, prefab headquarters decisions are taken that can have a huge impact on the lives of millions of people in Afghanistan, the Balkans and elsewhere.
Given such a concentration of power – and the fact that the United States dominates NATO and the EU is its major political ally and trading partner – one would have thought there would be hordes of American correspondents. Yet in recent years the number of American journalists reporting from Brussels has declined in almost inverse proportion to the EU’s growth in size and influence.
The New York Times, which boasts 26 foreign bureaus across the world, does not have a correspondent in Brussels, although the International Herald Tribune – which is owned by the Times but published in Paris – now has two first-rate reporters. It is a similar story at the Washington Post - which has reporters in Bogota, Shanghai and Toronto, but not Brussels. Ditto USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times and every other major U.S. daily except the Wall Street Journal, which is published in the Belgian capital. Time Magazine did have a bureau in Brussels but shifted its correspondent to Paris several years ago. Newsweek has no one.
American TV stations are also almost completely absent in Brussels, despite the fact that the BBC and many other broadcasters use the Belgian capital as their European hub. CNN, which has 27 foreign bureaus, used to have an office in the EU area but obviously felt the job could be better done – or at least more cheaply done – from London. It will come as no surprise to learn that Fox News has no one covering the life inside the ‘Belgeway.’
“There is no proper coverage of Brussels by quality American papers,” says Michael Stabenow, former president of the Foreign Press Association and long-time correspondent of German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “It’s quite astonishing since Brussels is not only the headquarters for the EU institutions but also NATO.”
Others are less bothered by the U.S. media’s absenteeism. One European Commission official who frequently deals with the U.S. press says the downsizing of American newspapers’ presence in Brussels simply reflects a global trend. “Media interest in serious foreign issues – unless it involves U.S. troops – has always been depressingly low but in recent years the number of foreign correspondent s of American newspapers and broadcasters has been consistently cut back.”
American wire services, on the other hand, have a strong and growing presence in Brussels. Bloomberg is the biggest with about 15 full-time reporters – up from three a decade ago. Associated Press also has a well-staffed office. United Press International, which had 30 journalists in the Belgian capital in the late 1950s, closed its one-man bureau last year.
“With the wire services covering Brussels so well, there is not a huge price to pay – for either readers or competitors - for not having a correspondent in Brussels,” says Robert Gianfrancesci, spokesman for the U.S. mission to the European Union.
When American newspapers established foreign bureaus, Brussels was not as important as Paris or London, he argues, adding that the U.S. media’s virtual boycott of Brussels is more to do with “inertia” than intent.
James Graff, a former Brussels bureau chief for Time Magazine who is now based in Paris, says it often makes more sense to cover the EU from national capitals. “The biggest EU story in the last decade was in Paris when the French rejected the EU constitution,” he says. Likewise, Graff argues that the best way to cover the Afghan conflict is not at NATO HQ but in Afghanistan and London, Paris and Amsterdam – where the decisions to send troops are ultimately taken.
Many U.S. newspapers and broadcasters cover the EU and NATO from the French and British capitals, with varying degrees of success. At its best, American reporting of Europe is clearer, livelier and less prone to navel-gazing than that produced by the cosy clique of Brussels-based journalists. At its worst it is shallow, sugary and error-strewn.
Tom Reid chronicled the rise of the European Union for the Washington Post from London and wrote a best-selling book about it entitled “The United States of Europe.” While rightly observing that Americans are either ignorant or in denial about the rise of the EU as a global power, the book is riddled with howlers. He describes the “Schuman Declaration” as a “sort of Declaration of Independence for the European Union” and observes that “Just as Americans celebrate the declaration of 1776 with parties, picnics ands fireworks every July 4, the people of Europe today celebrate the declaration of 1950 with parties, picnics and fireworks every May 9.” At another point the author says the draft EU constitution would cede much of states’ sovereignty to a “common central government” – which would be news to many of the blueprint’s signatories. Even the title of the book is more wishful thinking than reasoned observation.
If Reid has a tendency to exaggerate the extent of EU integration, other senior American journalists still believe the only decision-making capitals of Europe are London, Paris and Berlin and the Union’s lack of military clout excludes it from the elite superpower club. “There is a lack of understanding of the impact of what’s happening in Brussels,” says Stabenow. “Many foreign desks don’t see the difference between an international organization like the United Nations and a supranational body like the EU, where decisions are legally-binding.”
There is no question that the U.S. government, especially in President Bush’s second term, reluctantly realises the EU is a major world player. One of the first decisions taken by former Bush adviser Karen Hughes, the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, was to create three regional information hubs worldwide. One is in London, the other is in Dubai and the third – the only one dealing with the non-Arab world - is in the Belgian capital. “One advantage of being in Brussels is the huge international press corps,” says Gianfrancesci. “It allows us to reach all the major European media in one place.”
Few would argue the EU is unimportant, but is it interesting for U.S. readers and viewers? Time Magazine’s Graff says there is repetitiveness to EU news stories – like the constitution - that makes it “easy for editors to ask: when am I going to hear something new out of Brussels.”
Another problem, says Graff, is that the language used in the Brussels bubble of lobbyists, officials and policy wonks – qualified majority voting, co-decision, inter-governmental conference and the like – is so euro-specific it is difficult to translate. “The EU polity is so complicated it’s hard to get to the meat of the conflict without a whole load of explanatory paragraphs,” he says. Finally, says Graff, the EU “makes decisions that sound important but don’t have any concrete results. It doesn’t send troops to die or pass laws that are immediately put into action.”
These are frustrations echoed by many journalists in Brussels, a one-horse news city where process is power, jargon is rife and real debate sadly lacking. The rain-soaked Belgian capital is not a glamorous posting where correspondents are likely to witness revolution, famine, civil war or even sexual scandal. It is an inward-looking, slow-moving place where decisions on haddock quotas in the north-west Atlantic make headlines. Faced with competition for air time and column inches from David Beckham’s latest hair-cut, suicide bombings in Iraq and immigrants clinging to tuna nets in the Mediterranean, is it any wonder editors largely ignore the EU?
There are ways of making the European Union interesting for an American audience – Time Magazine and the International Herald Tribune do it on a regular basis – but this requires reporters to focus on the effects of policies on people outside Brussels rather than how those decisions were reached within the self-styled EU capital. Unfortunately, digging deeper and travelling wider for stories eats up time and money – two commodities in short supply in today’s cut-throat media environment.
Ultimately, does it matter if there are precious few American correspondents reporting on the European Union and NATO from Brussels? Privately, officials at the United States’ NATO and EU missions are concerned at the paucity of American reporting about the EU, as are European diplomats in Washington. Their reasoning is simple: if Americans know little about their biggest trading partner and only reliable, major power ally on the world stage, it can only lead to further misunderstandings, misconceptions and mistrust between Europe and the United States.