Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-09-07-Speech-2-539"
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"en.20100907.33.2-539"2
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"Madam President, this House regularly discusses freedom of the press both within and outside Europe and, like you, I remember a heated debate in the autumn of 2009 on freedom of the press in Italy, among other countries. Was it legitimate for us Europeans to point the finger at Italy and its prime minister Mr Berlusconi, or was it a domestic matter in which the rest of Europe should not have been interfering? In July, the Representative on Freedom of the Media of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) published her report. She did dare to point the finger. The OSCE has done the rounds in Europe and drawn our attention to the following countries. The murder of a blogger, Socrates Giolias, in Greece, the murder of a journalist, Grigorijs Nemcovs, in Latvia, the new media law in Hungary that encroaches on the autonomy of public TV channels and decreases the available media, and the presidential supervision of public channels in France by President Sarkozy. I have just heard something about Romania, and then, of course, there are the latest developments in Italy whereby a law prohibits investigative journalists from reproducing wire tapped materials.
Turkey, Serbia, Albania and Bosnia-Herzegovina, too – countries with the prospect of joining the European Union – receive reprimands from the OSCE, and rightly so. A big stick remains for these countries, however: membership of the European Union. Freedom of the press is one of our Copenhagen criteria. Therefore, benchmarking is used for accession countries, and it is distressing to see that the European Council does not consider these benchmarks applicable to itself. If it were up to the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance, Italy would indeed lose its voting rights in the Council whilst it persisted in the repression of journalists and whilst everything continued to be in the hands of a single businessman and prime minister.
To return to the subject of media concentration, however, the fact that commercial and public media in Italy are in the same hands is well known, but let us not forget that there are also Axel Springer, Bertelsmann, Rupert Murdoch and, in the Netherlands and Belgium, Christian van Thillo, who owns a very large number of newspapers. A free press is crucial to our democracy, and it is up to the European Commission to present us with a proposal to combat media concentration, precisely because we have to take the OSCE seriously."@en1
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