If you were asked to list some common myths about the European Union, which would you choose? The ban on curved bananas? The plan to rename yogurt “fermented milk pudding”? You might think of the claim that EU regulations on cabbage run to 26,911 words. Or you might think of a more insidious fiction genre. The charge that EU policy is decided by unelected bureaucrats, for example, or that the bloc forces member states to admit refugees.
Between those points on the misinformation spectrum, between preposterous tabloid invention and slyly twisted debating point, is a third type of falsehood that arguably poses a bigger problem. This one masquerades as a point of view, a status that implies any evidence to the contrary is a matter of interpretation.
A domestic media market in which only a handful of players have the resources and the inclination to treat foreign news seriously makes it easier for misconceptions to flourish
Its cause is less wilful deceit than ignorance. An example: France wants EU corporate tax harmonisation because its president has it in for Ireland. Another: Germany’s car industry will eventually force Angela Merkel to give London a good Brexit deal. And a third, more recent one: the EU wants to block all vaccine exports to the UK. All three of these claims were, at one time or another, accepted as self-evident in parts of mainstream public discussion. But they were all bogus.
And it was not that hard to find information that showed you why they were bogus. If you spoke French and German, or had the patience to decipher Google Translate, you could follow debates in those countries and see for yourself. You could seek out data from EU institutions. Or you could get your news from independent outlets that invest in good European coverage.
The problem is that that’s not how most people get their information. In Ireland, a national aversion to learning other people’s languages and a domestic media market in which only a handful of players have the resources and the inclination to treat foreign news seriously makes it easier for misconceptions to flourish. The strong penetration of British media, with their complexes and biases, makes the problem worse. But this is an issue of concern across the EU, where it has proven much easier to get people, goods and services moving across borders than it has to create a single market for news and information. That more than anything else impedes the development of a genuine European public sphere.
A lot of EU news is produced by informed journalists living on the continent, but it is still filtered through newsrooms that reflect the frame of reference of their domestic audiences
The problem has come into sharper focus with Brexit. The media outlets with the widest reach publish in English. That means, with a couple of exceptions, including Irish outlets such as this one, that the EU news that circulates fastest online is produced by publishers and broadcasters based outside the bloc. A lot of that material is produced by informed journalists living on the continent, but the news they produce is still filtered through newsrooms that reflect the frame of reference of their domestic audiences. The effect is that much of the world sees the EU through a distorting lens. So do Europeans themselves, whose media are increasingly shaped by the Anglosphere and its perspective. As Wolfgang Blau, former global chief operating officer of Condé Nast, has observed, this is one of the reasons global coverage of the EU so often frames it as a remote economic zone perpetually on the brink of collapse. The further Britain drifts from the EU, the more jarring all of this will become.
One obvious answer is to build pan-European media. The European Commission subsidises multilingual broadcasting and funds transnational media collaborations. Exciting start-ups have emerged that specialise in translation and syndication. Established players such as El Pais and Le Monde publish sections in different languages, and all major operators have been closely watching the experiments of Politico Europe and the New European, which primarily target the cosmopolitan Brussels bubble. That tight focus mitigates two of the obstacles that face first-movers with wider European ambitions: the absence of a pan-European ad market and the challenge of building a subscription base from scratch in unfamiliar markets.
The most rewarding, if not necessarily the fastest, solution is of course for Europeans to learn more of each other's languages
Another response, which Blau prefers, is to create “English-language media spheres” anchored in the already trusted national news organisations across the EU. Others hope machine translation will one day enable European citizens to read material published in every continental language in real time, as easily as they can watch Dix Pour Cent or Borgen on Netflix.
The most rewarding, if not necessarily the fastest, solution is of course for Europeans to learn more of each other's languages. News consumption is a misnomer; it is not a mere transactional act. The same goes for languages. John le Carré, one of the sharpest Irish observers of modern Britain and a proud European throughout his life, said the decision to learn a foreign language – in his case, German – was an act of friendship, an awakening, a holding out a hand. Ultimately, he said, to be a linguist – someone who cherishes the accuracy, the meaning and the beauty of language – was to be "the custodian of truth in a dangerous age".
The ability to move between languages may not amount to a vaccine against ignorance, but there are few better ways to slow its transmission.