Media and Politics in Europe

the Austrian political elite has to ask itself how it sees the future of Muslims, who constitute nine percent of the population, in the country. While most political parties have been either silent or supportive  of anti-Muslim policies, the infamous Operation Luxor is a welcoming occasion to rethink the approach of the past years.

many acknowledge their fresh of support for the President since his crackdown.  Asked about the 21,000 or so black migrants residing in Tunisia, no one here is racist, they say – they simply want to distinguish between those who are here legally and illegally. It sounds reasonable enough. In fact, it could probably pass for small talk at a Conservative Party fundraiser. However, at least in Tunisia, that reasonableness fades when pressed. “They’re selling cocaine, they’re selling their wives and their girlfriends to each other,” Bassem, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler, told me. “They’re even buying boats and taking still more migrants to Europe.” In this part of Ariana, every Tunisian has a lurid tale, always experienced at one remove, which they reel off as ‘proof’ of the criminality of the country’s black migrant population.

To date, none of these stories are troubling Tunisia’s mainstream media, which appears more focused on defending Tunisia’s national image and parroting the President’s attack lines than delivering facts to a public growing increasingly hostile to the unwarranted international condemnation it feels itself subject to.

the UK’s established media has spent the past week fixated on the employment terms of a BBC sports commentator than scrutinising a law that stands to make the lives of tens of thousands of people immeasurably worse.

Just as the UK media is yet to truly reckon with the financial impact of Brexit on the country’s poorest, so the Tunisian media is unwilling to fully address the consequences of the suspension of the World Bank partnership and the increasing uncertainty surrounding a sorely needed IMF bail-out. 

The morality of the UK government’s policies towards refugees is treated as an afterthought across almost all of the media

In a film on institutional racism that wasn’t shown on British terrestrial television, after clips of politicians including Enoch Powell, Margaret Thatcher, and Harold Wilson all expressing variants of the ‘swamped’ by immigration rhetoric, Ambalavaner Sivanandan — the late novelist and director of the Institute for Race Relations — said:Looked at in terms of the history of race and immigration in this country, it says one thing to me: What Enoch Powell says today, the Conservative Party says tomorrow, and the Labour Party legislates on the day after.

With a press and media that want to pretend that we have ideological diversity in politics where there is virtually none, we are living in a one-party state that changes which colour of managerial autocrat fronts it once every decade or so.

Is it really so surprising that newspapers that are generally too mimsy to print the word fuck would flee from the word ‘fascism’? Especially when the fruits of this system have been so bountiful to their proprietors.

make comparisons to the 1930s; its fascism did not arrive fully formed but crept forward day by day. You can’t keep saying it’s “just one of those days”. Those days add up.

the Conservatives and Johnson have benefitted since this time from the techniques pioneered by Cambridge Analytica – exploiting the UK’s lack of digital campaigning laws. Johnson in particular “has resisted regulation of it at every stage and this is further evidence that we must wake up to the threat it poses to our democracy,”

It has also been claimed that Cambridge Analytica worked on the pro-Brexit campaign, with Leave.EU’s former communications director Andy Wigmore saying that Cambridge Analytica was “more than happy to help… we shared a lot of information”. The official Vote Leave campaign, fronted by Johnson, also spent most its online campaigning budget (including a late, unlawful overspend) through the Canadian agency AggregateIQ (AIQ), a spin-off business linked to SCL, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, with AIQ managing Cambridge Analytica’s technology platform – Ripon – and its databases.

Cambridge Analytica and its parent company closed operations in May 2018, while Facebook was fined $5 billion by Federal Trade Commission in America over Cambridge Analytica’s use of unauthorised data, and £500,000 by the ICO (the maximum fine available).

climate change is a systemic challenge, but most news organizations are still treating it only as a topic

Public broadcasters in Europe have an unrivalled responsibility to get it right, because they are comparatively well-funded. In addition, they tend to be their country's most-trusted news organization. Especially when it comes to climate journalism, an audience’s trust in a news organization is a hugely important ingredient.  Sometimes I have been struck by the timidity of public service media. Yes, they are under growing political pressure in many countries. But to preemptively capitulate is not a strategy.

many editors think of climate journalism as crisis reporting.  And while it is important to cover extreme weather events, they are still only the breaking news surface of something much more profound and systemic

There are so many important and interesting stories just on climate adaptation alone that you would overlook as an editor when you reduce climate journalism only to breaking news and crisis reporting.      

It is always a good start to build a climate desk, and news organizations need climate specialists. But they are no substitute for increasing the climate literacy, or climate fluency, of all desks.

All it took for the last IPCC report to be washed out of the news cycle within hours was an actor misbehaving at the Oscars. It had taken seven years to produce that report.

energy literacy is a core aspect of climate journalism and it seems the war in Ukraine has also heightened the world’s awareness for just how integral energy is to our societies and economies. A next phase in this realization may be that the much-needed shift to renewable energies will come with its own new set of geopolitical dependencies

The location of the denial has shifted. It has shifted from denying climate science, and specifically that climate change since the pre-industrial age is human-made to denying how urgent our situation is and how little time we have left to avoid a much more dramatic course of events. The willingness to embrace the time pressure we are under is part of climate literacy. 

I have never heard a young journalist say ‘I am somehow glad I won’t live long enough to see the worst effects of climate change’ while I have seen quite a few older colleagues express such sentiments. Some of them were even middle-aged, which makes me think they never looked at an IPCC report.      

I have met the CEOs of very large global companies who had deep knowledge of the climate crisis while I have yet to meet just one chief editor with a similar degree of climate knowledge

It is the nature of the climate crisis, though, to move faster than most of us think. I wouldn’t be surprised to soon see a major news organization re-organize itself around the climate crisis as their organizational axis.