Strong-worded discreditation attempt launched by former rector and current lecturer at the Central European University.Continue reading
According to an opinion piece published in the French news portal Boulevard Voltaire written by Libération has announced a free offer for an online subscription to the new newsletter “European Focus” on its own website. Associated with eight other titles of the European press, this new media will be responsible for “delivering a new way to read Europe every week”.
In Delarue’s view, Brussels has found a solution to its image problem among EU citizens: the project is ambitious as well as generous: “Every Wednesday in your mailboxes, a newsletter from Sarajevo, Madrid, Warsaw, Paris, Kyiv, Tallinn, Rome, Budapest and Berlin at once. Geographical pluralism”, says the EU advert. “Libération and eight other media, located from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, have decided to join forces to discuss issues that concern us all”, announces the EU funded project proudly.
Starting on September 28, every Wednesday, subscribers will be able to read “five articles, in English, discussing the same topic, but always with different points of view. In principle. However, even if the left-wing Libération tells us that “in Ukraine, in Germany or in Estonia, the debates on the delivery of arms to Kyiv are not the same, they do not resonate with the same history, with the same urgency, but together they contribute to draw Europe”,
one could hardly detect in the selected titles something like a dissenting voice on the subject, points out the French publicist.
The eight publications selected to spread Brussels’ friendly image, all are discernibly of a liberal world-view, and all fiercely pro-European loyalists: Balkan-Insight (Bosnia-Herzegovina), Delfi (Estonia), Domani (Italy), El Confidencial (Spain), Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland), HVG (Hungary), Libération (France) and Tagesspiegel (Germany). All of this is financed by the European Commission under the leadership of the German N-ost, another left-wing media outlet, partnered with politically active NGOs such as Transparency International, and funded by well-known pro-migration, pro-multiculturalism institutions such as the Robert Bosch Stiftung. N-Ost also receives generous funding from various branches of the German government.
The chosen Hungarian partner portal, HVG, is a well known critic of Hungary’s national-conservative government lead by Viktor Orbán. Furthermore, among the board members of N-Ost, one can find Hungarian journalist Zoltán Sipos’name, who is from the anti-government news portal Átlátszó, that has recently been in the center of media attention for reportedly receiving large amounts of money from US lobby groups linked to the Democrats, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
The author Marie Delarue compares the new EU sponsored syndicate to a “propaganda squadron”, a service created by the authorities to control the press and publishing. It is not known how much money the European Union is allocating for this positive publicity project, but
the blatant one sidedness of the entire project is there to see even for the casual observer.
Vera Jourová. Photo: European Commission
European and, for that matter, German taxpayer money is thus used for an entirely one sided progressive europhile propaganda, where only publications with a proven anti-conservative track record need apply. This is clearly contrary to Brussels’ self-declared struggle for press-freedom and media-pluralism as formulated by the Vice-President for Values and Transparency, Věra Jourová, in which she declared that: “no public media should be turned into propaganda channel. This is what we are proposing today for the first time ever: common safeguards to protect media freedom and pluralism in the EU”.
Featured Photo: Facebook European Commission