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The EU Blog Wars Have Begun
The EU gets tough on blogs
England Expects, the leading Eurosceptic "insider's blog", is no more.
Blogger Gawain Towler was the subject of complaints for breaching the EU Parliament's code of conduct and threatened with a loss of his livelihood (he is Press officer of the UK delegation to the Ind/Dem Group, the UK Independence Party, and as such an employee of the EU) if he continued to blog.
Gawain admits he was in breach of the code of conduct, though as Press Officer for an anti-EU party, "My job is to bring the institutions into disrepute, which I am doing, well if I am any good I should be doing."
It does seem that bloggers outside EU offices are safe, for the time being. MEPs on Thursday rejected a call by Estonian MEP Marianne Mikko "for full clarification of the legal status of webblog authors, disclosure of bloggers' interests and the voluntary labelling of blogs" - instead, they voted for what the EU Observer is calling "much softer language" - "an open discussion on all issues relating to the status of weblogs."
The site reports that Ms Mikko's recommendations had been supported by MEPs across the political spectrum when fed through committees. A recent European Commission report leaked earlier this month said that the EU was "losing the battle for hearts and minds" partly because of the activities of anti-EU bloggers. The recent defeat of the Lisbon Treaty in the Irish referendum led Eurocrats to study blog activity in the Republic; they concluded that Eurosceptic blogs, some by anonymous sources, outnumbered pro-treaty blogs. Of course the fact that the main Irish newspapers were overwhelmingly pro-Lisbon didn't seem to worry them unduly.
"Blogging is also seen as an anti-establishment activity," the report concluded, complaining that "the quality of debate has suffered" as a result of blog dissent attracting the attention of readers from TV and radio.
Bloggers anonymous and otherwise have good reason to be delighted to have proved a thorn in the EU's side on this and other issues. The mainstream media on continental Europe is increasingly docile: Blogs offer the only real dissent in some countries. Even in Britain, where Eurosceptic newspapers enjoy a large market share, the reporting of EU issues is feeble: Dedicated Eurosceptic bloggers like Richard North spend almost as much effort correcting false Eurosceptic reporting as they do criticising the EU itself.
Bloggers may have escaped the scrutiny of Ms Mikko and her snoops for now, though there is nothing to stop her creating a secret EU taskforce to track down and discredit bloggers she disapproves of. In the longer term, moves towards regulation enjoy support in sometimes unlikely places.
Journalists are increasingly stung by dissenting bloggers. Once, columnists and hacks could thunder their views from the comments pages, untroubled by the common herd. With the arrival of "have your say" boxes in online editions, the authority of official columnists has been fatally undermined.
The Guardian's Polly Toynbee attracts a swarm of "pedants" (her description) who correct her basic economics after every column (Tim Worstall is one of the best offenders). George Monbiot and Seumas Milne are also eviscerated by their online critics. Right-wing columnists aren't immune.
So, it should come as no surprise that a Guardian columnist should complain about the "lies and deceit" the web encourages: "We may soon have to consider devising controls on entry, though what form they'll take is not easy to envisage. It is possible that we will find out, in five or 10 or 20 years, that, in the internet, we have created a monster we cannot tame, whose capacity for doing harm exceeds any good it once brought", writes Marcel Berlins. Janet Daley wrote a similar piece in the Telegraph calling for an end to anonymous commenting and blogging. As a supposed liberal, she should know better.
It all seems so 2004 to talk about the power (or, in EU terms, the danger) of bloggers. Has it taken so long for Europe to catch up? This belated recognition of the power of individual voices in new media isn't celebrated in centralising Europe as it was in the United States.
US bloggers had the thrill of throwing spears into the furry hide of the American mainstream media, attacking its obsessive program of spin, bias and news management. In Europe, however, the game is bigger: The EU itself has decided that bloggers pose a threat to its status and even existence.
As the Telegraph's Brussels commentator Bruno Waterfield puts it,
"The EU blog wars have begun. The Commission and Brussels institutions know it. The next battle between them and us, establishment and anti-establishment, official and unofficial is only a matter of time. What are they going to do about it? Is the EU ready? Are you ready?"
