Television news: In the shadow of the president, another crisis hid

Last week, the two most important political systems in the world reached crisis points. The President of the US went on trial. And the European Parliament stirred from its wonted torpor to challenge the European Commission.

Neither process is wholly satisfactory and neither seems likely to reach the conclusion that seems to be devoutly desired by substantial majorities of the populations of the US and Europe.

What is fascinating, and also of enormous importance, is how these two stories are covered, especially by television news, from which well over three-quarters of the population derive their information about the world. Indeed, television news is especially vital on Europe, because so many British newspapers print no news, only propaganda, on the subject.

The first contrast last week was one of simple quantity. There was enormously more reporting on Clinton's impeachment over the past couple of weeks than on the revelations of the Dutch whistleblower, Paul van Bultenen, and on the constitutional upheaval he has set off.

The second difference was one of news values. The British television news culture is utterly at home in Washington. The characters, the errant husband, the long-suffering wife, the relentless prosecutor, the sexy intern and her faithless girlfriend, are as familiar as the cast of a soap.

British news organisations know where to download footage from the US networks, and who will do a reliable number if invited into the studio for comment. Washington is part of the British news industry's universe. Correspondents, and the newsrooms behind them, are completely at home in Washington, less so in Brussels.

There are several reasons for this, but the difficulty of physically covering the story is not one of them. Facilities for journalists in the European complex are good, going on luxurious. Nor are the European institutions, in the superficial sense, inaccessible. The European commissioners, for example, all sport multilingual spokespersons.

It is not usually hard to arrange interviews with the most importance players. I can say from personal experience that it is, in general, easier, and certainly quicker, to arrange an interview with the President of the European Commission than with the President of the US. But then that ought to be so. We are, after all, members of the European Union, and not of the US.

There is greater transparency in Washington, and the European parliament is right to insist that there must be more in Brussels. But the real problems are language, culture and political consciousness.

Around the walls of meeting rooms in Brussels are glass booths for the amazingly skillful instantaneous translators, labelled Dansk, Deutsch, English, Hellenica, Francais and so on. They will be joined in due course by Polish, Czech, Hungarian and the rest. It is true that the EU is concentrating more on three languages, Deutsch, English and Francais, and that most people in Brussels speak English pretty well. But language remains a formidable barrier.

European politicians tend to sound duller than American politicians because we are attuned to the jokes, slang and subtle suggestions of American English. Some of them may actually be duller; but not all. No one could call either Emma Bonino or Edith Cresson, for example, dull.

Then, too, we linguistic imperialists, unlike the other Europeans, limit our access to European politicians. We insist on hearing only English on the box. I once had a row with Oskar Lafontaine (Oskar and I were both younger and less mellow then) and he was outraged at the idea that he had to do the interview in English. Why couldn't British TV, he asked, dub an answer given in German into English like anyone else did? He had a point, but it was no good putting it to the bosses at ITN.

Newsroom culture is steeped in the assumption that European politicians are remote, funny and probably up to no good. If you go to the morning briefings at the Commission's headquarters, there are several hundred journalists from fourteen countries trying to find out what happened in some particular story, and half-a-dozen raucous Brits for whom the only story is how sinister, or ridiculous, Brussels is.

Television newsrooms do not sink to the absurd, propagandistic levels of some British newspapers. But the assumptions of the newsroom culture are not dissimilar. In particular there is little curiosity about individuals. We are told quite a bit about Trent Lott or Newt Gingrich; we know Jacques Delors or Jacques Santer only as cardboard cut-outs. It is easy to build a story around the well-known foibles of familiar characters; much harder to interest viewers in suits with funny accents.

What this boils down to is the absence of a shared European political consciousness. If there is to be one, television news will play a major part in creating it. The European parliament is trying for the first time to end the "democratic deficit" and wrest real power from the commission. although the vote oust all 20 commissioners failed narrowly, the consequences for us will be momentous. How long before British news editors wake up to the idea that fraud in Brussels can be as sexy as perjury in Washington, and a lot more to do with us?"