JMECE SEMINAR PROGRAMME – EVENTS
Meeting with EU expert and UK Head of the EU Commission until 2005
Geoff Martin, from the Commonwealth Secretariat
Monday, 10th March 2008 – EU, Media and the Citizen
Location: ICS seminar room – Houldsworth Building, University of Leeds
See photos of that event HERE
Report of the event by Stergios Mavrikis:
Geoff Martin is the Special Adviser to the Commonwealth Secretary General on Strategic Relationships. He was head of the European Commission in the U.K. since 1993 and inaugural Head of the European Commission in N.Ireland. He spoke for the JMECE Lab members and students of “Communicating Europe” module at ICS about Europe’s communication deficit.
As an experienced public speaker he mentioned that he is extremely sceptical about “what his former colleagues are trying to achieve in the context of communicating Europe”. He started his talk with the pessimistic note that Britain “remains the country least interested in the European Union”. UK and EU citizens want to know about Europe “what they feel they want to know”. They don’t need propagandistic material in its nature.
One of the reasons why UK citizens are not adequately informed about EU is because British press is very rampant in comparison to the press of rest of the continent, interested in “money coming from advertisers”. Only Finacial Times and BBC report the facts about Europe because “their audiences are people from all over the world”.
Geoff Martin continued his speech saying that national governments do not see that they have a responsibility to communicate Europe. Within countries there is no national sense of the need to be talking about Europe. In EU level European Commission’s role is not or shouldn’t be to communicate Europe. It is not the right platform from which to talk or communicate Europe. European Parliament should address this issue.
He closed his illuminating speech mentioning that, since citizens would like to be given the opportunity to follow current European affairs, we should all “leave the media alone to report about Europe”.
