Keynote speech at the conference on investigative journalism in Europe – Brussels, 21 November 2008

Ladies and gentlemen,

I will read you a letter from the past.

Washington  DC,  11 November 1934
My dear mr Hopkins,

I came in today from Gastonia, North Carolina, and it was as flat and grim as it is to be expected. I got a notice from your office asking about ‘protest groups’. (… But) every house I visited – mill worker or unemployed – had a picture of the President. These ranged from newspaper clippings (in destitute homes) to large coloured prints, framed in gilt cardboard.

I went to see a woman with five children who was living on relief (3 dollar 40 a week). Her picture of President Roosevelt was a small one, and she told me her oldest daughter had been married some months ago and had cried for the big coloured picture as a wedding present. The children have no shoes and that woman is terrified of the coming cold. There is almost no furniture left in the home, and you can imagine what  and how they eat. But she said, suddenly brightening: ‘I did give my heart to see the President. I know he means to do everything he can for us; but they make it hard for him; they wont let him.’ I note this case as something special; because here the faith was coupled with a feeling (entirely sympathetic) that the President was not omnipotent.

I have seen mill-workers; and in every mill, when possible, the local Union president. There has been widespread discrimination against Union members in the south, and many mills haven’t reopened since the strike. The price of food has risen – especially the kind of food they eat: fat back bacon, four, corn meal -  as high as 100 per cent. It is getting cold, and they have no clothes. (..)

You would expect to find the people maddened with fear, with hostility. (..) I didn’t find it. I found a kind of contained and quiet misery; fear for their families and fear that their children wouldn’t be able to go to school. ‘All we want is work and the chance to care for our families like a man should, ’ they say. But what is keeping them sane, keeping them going on and hoping, is their belief in the President.
What the rights and wrongs of this are, I don’t know.’

Signed:  Martha Gellhorn

Yes, sometimes history comes almost back at our doorsteps.

Martha Gellhorn, then 26 years old, would become one of the most famous war-correspondents of the 20th century, but in those days she worked the so called FERA, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, under Harry Hopkins, a senior figure in Roosevelts New Deal. Hopkins had collected a team of young researchers, who reported to him from different parts of  the country on what effect the Depression and the New Deal were having on individual people. Hopkins asked his reporters specially for impressions, not statistics.

Martha Gellhorn was the youngest of this special branch of reporters – another two were James Agee and the later famous photographer Walker Evans – and she was send off to the textile mills of the Carolinas and New England, from where she sended back long, passionate and sometimes angry letters. Some of her letters came back in a half fictional book she wrote afterwards, The Trouble I have seen. But most of them were just read by the people they were aimed at, included president Roosevelt himself.

Gellhorn was a kind of explorer in a unknown country, like all journalist are.  She wrote already history – her impressions contain still valuable information – while everything still happened and the historical situation was as young as a fresh baked bread. She had a sharp eye for details, and in the same time she knew very well how to select al those bits of information she got and to make one story out of it. She was, young as she was, in fact a perfect spy on behalf of the king. Just as we all are, in the European field. The King’s spies.

The first question, which rises immediately, is of course: who is our King. Whom we are serving, and under which laws? King reader, king viewer, king listener, we are shouting of course immediately, but that answer is less self evident than a decade ago. We are working, as journalists, in a very difficult and complicated transition period of the media, and nobody knows where it will end.

Sometimes I feel myself, as a men of books and newspapers, like a sailor on a fantastic clipper-sailingship, a century ago. I know that I’am working on one of the best sailingships ever developed, and in the same time I realize that this whole technology of wood and sails is hopelessly outdated. Everywhere in Europe and in the rest of the world specially the printed media, in the past the main source of quality-journalism, are in big trouble, and the credit-crisis is only speeding up a structural decline which is going on already for some time.

Everywhere the circulation-figures are going down, sometimes dramatically. The LA Times reduced last month his editorial staff again, it has in its legendary newsroom now only still half the staff members it had just seven years ago. Last month Standard & Poor's slashed its ratings on the New York Times Co into junk territory, so bad was the revenue outlook for the publisher of one of the world most leading newspapers.  And so we have all also our own stories, and I don’t need to tell you the raison of this fast decline.

Of course, other media, especially television, are taking over a part of the investigative role the newspapers had in the 20th century. But I’am afraid it is not enough. At the recent American Magazine Conference about this subject one of the speakers, Eric Schmidt, worried that, if the great brands of journalism – the trusted news sources that readers traditionally have relied on – were to vanish, then the Web itself would quickly become, in his words, a ‘cesspool’ of useless information. Eric Schmidt, who predicted this, is not an old, hand wringing journalist. He is, in fact, one of the big bosses of Google.

So, when we are talking about quality-journalism, like we all want to do these days, we should always keep in mind that we are in fact talking about a fortress under a heavy siege. We have not only to do our job as good as possible, we have also to defend our profession and integrity with all the means we possess.

So most journalists are working nowadays under more pressure than in the past, or, I can better say, other kinds of pressure.

There is the pressure of the publishers, who want  its reporters to produce the news for more outlets with less people – a newspaperman of woman has, for instance, nowadays not only to research and write a piece for his paper, but also to make a shortened version for the flashing morning-edition, and to make a permanent update for the internet, and often also to make some radio and television-stuff. All the time and energy this reporter has to put in this new news outlets is distracting him from the real job: researching and reporting.

There is also the subtile pressure of the institutions journalists are working within, the rules and habits of a political and bureaucratic culture which come become after some time a part of yourself, if you like it or not. 

There is also the pressure from the public, where the flames of populist politics sometimes spread to the area of journalism and where the leading slogan sometimes seems to have changed from ‘All the News that’s fit to print’ to ‘All the News that’s the people like to hear’. And we all now that people love certainty, and dislike complexity. And we all know too, alas, how complex Europe really is.

And still, a important part of our job as a the Kings spy is to keep a fresh look at the situations we are in and the people we meet, always. Martha Gellhorn was very good at this. Although she had fierce opinions – at the end she was even fired because of them -, her letters to Harry Hopkins have also often an very open-minded atmosphere. For us, journalists and non-fiction writers, is the first question  never what we think, but which reality presents itself to us. And how we select, out of all the confused information we get, the lines which are really important. And, at the end, how we translate our findings to king reader or listener.

It looks so simple, this open mind attitude, but it is it never. There are strong forces around us, European writers and journalists, and from day to day we have to refind our own integrity between very powerful, effective and also seductive influences.

First there is of course Brussels, a city and an European phenomena in one. Brussels brings us the seduction of the power, of the logics of the bureaucratic world, and also the fascination of the European project in progress, one of the most important and unique historic experiments we are witnessing in our live times.
The wheeling and dealing of the European councils and institutions are fascinating in some way, but it is a fascination for the lovers and the insiders. The eternal problem for us, writers and journalist, with Brussels – and I wish I could you give some good advice on it, but I don’t have it – is that Brussels is not sexy.  What happens here backs out, in some way, of  the rules of the drama and the story, the lines which in the end also rule a good journalistic story. There are drama’s here, for sure, on all kinds of occasions and between all kinds of people. But, in contrary to the national and local politics, in some way the laws of the political theatre don’t work here well.

Politics and democratic systems need some kind of personalisation, and the European project needs its desperately, with the political theatre and the political drama which inevitable belong to it. I expect this situation will change in the future, but at the moment we have to live with the fact that it is very difficult to write good, attractive stories about Brussels. 

Often they put the blame on the reporters in Brussels. But it is not their fault. It is the result of one of the big mistakes within the European construction: too many institutions, too less human faces. And, like at other occasions, the Union pays a price for that. 

There is another problem when you are seduced by the powers in Brussels: they are existing 1000 km away from the real European story. Or 500. Or 50.

I give you an example from the poor Hungarian village which I describe in the opening chapter of my Europe book, Vasarospec. Some friends of mine are living there, I ‘am still a regular visitor of the village, and I keep following life up there a little bit. So I can tell you that almost everybody who was unemployed ten years ago had found work now, and that almost everybody became a little bit richer – except the wife of the postman, who had to sell her house to some Dutchman. They have build also a kind of cultural centre, where every two weeks some disco dance is organised, subsidized  by the European Union. That’s the good news.

But the people up there cannot, because of the European rules, butcher their own pigs anymore. And the shop and the post office are gone, and so is the pub, the social centre of the village. The reason: in the past everybody pissed always outside, but because of the new European rules the owner had to build two separated toilets for man and woman, and that he couldn’t effort anymore.

And the thing is, now the Hungarian economics are in trouble, the people of this village forget very quick the economic blessings they got from the European Union, and they remember more and more the pub and the traditional habits which vanished when Europe touched their lives. They feel abandoned, more and more unsafe, robbed of their habits which made them in a way rather self supporting. And they become disappointed, and sometimes angry.

It is not a good mood for Europe. And it happens everywhere.

That’s the other side of Brussels.  Harry Hopkins had a very good eye for the fundamental distance between the well-meant administrative ideals in Washington, and the reality of the textile-factories of North Carolina. That was the reason why he insisted to send totally independent journalists and photographers around, to tell him what really happened. And he did that also because he knew that this journalistic way of looking at reality was specially important in the case of the New Deal, which was also a kind of social and economic experiment which never happened before.

There are also in and around Brussels and Europe in general quite a lot of Martha Gellhorns – or potential Martha Gellhorns. The problem is that there not so many Harry Hopkinses, leaders and managers who really want to listen to the people in Vasarosbec. This city is poisoned, even after the three disastrous referenda, with a kind of idealistic and bureaucratic arrogance, which will kill, in the end, the European project.
Sometimes I have the feeling that quit a lot of people here live in a kind of virtual reality, like a computer game, a virtuality that creates the permanent illusion that one is in total control over one’s own life and that anything which not fits in certain models simply does not exists. You see European rulers fight like hell to defend their very particular kind of what they call normality. Never, I have sometimes the impression, they take the reality from the streets seriously.

There is here an enormous neglected information problem between rulers and ruled, which ends in a severe legitimation problem. And again, the price Europe will pay is high.
 
I wish I could offer you a brighter picture today, but we, as reporters and as European citizens, we are really in trouble. What can we do in this situation, as writers and journalists? The first thing is, I propose, to forget our national trenches. We really need now to be Europeans, and to behave like and to think as Europeans.
The national model was eminently suited to tackling the issues of the 18th and 19th centuries. But now, in the 21st century, we are faced with European and global problems which the nation model is no longer capable of solving: climate, poverty, migration, epidemics, you name it.

Tomasso Padoa-Schippoa, the former right-hand of Jacques Delors, wrote last year in a cry from the heart: “The fact that Europe is not complete means great danger, not only for Europe, but for the whole world”. And why? Because Europe alone holds the key to a possible solution for these global problems, but has at the same time lapsed into a gentle melancholic mood. Europe “invented peace”, he writes, but is currently failing to make that peace reality.

Everything went always well, I hear people here in Brussels telling me, so it will go on in that way. Look at the Georgian crisis, at the banking crisis, Europe managed it, at the end, rather well. Still we all know that the situation would have been very different when, instead of France, for instance Tsjechië under mr Klaus would have had this autumn the presidency of the Union. It is a Russian roulette, this rotating presidency, and this time there was just not a bullet in the pistol. The king has, in fact, been very, very lucky, and as his spies we have to wake him up and to warn him, again, again, and again.

The second thing we have to do is to step out of our political trenches too. Of course, every journalist avoids to become part of a political battle, but still we form often, unintentional, in our work part of a system of ideological trenches. In the past we were, for instance, used to divide problem fields a little bit, in right and left. Environment was, for instance, a typical left-wing topic. I think every clever journalist crossed these kind of  ideological borders already a long time ago.

But with Europe and the European Union it is another thing. Almost all journalists I know who are specialized in European affairs, myself included, are in some way or the other also fascinated by the European experiment.  The most of us are, at the end, often pro-Europeans. We don’t like to be in the same trench with nationalists and anti-Europeans, and unintentionally we are sometimes less critical than we have to be. Most of us are doing a what they can, often within difficult circumstances, but on certain developments within the Union we were and we are not critical enough.

Most of us knew, for instance, very well that Romania and  Bulgaria were at the beginning of 2007 not really ready for a full membership, and that there was an enormous make-up operation going on. This kind of news was researched and published too, but not enough. We know that the European Union is as a Union totally out of balance: things every union of states and every federation leaves to the member-states – like how to make cheese, and the composition of bread  - are regulated by Brussels, while things that every union of states organises on a central level – foreign affairs and defence for instance – are mostly still organised on a national level. And we know all the enormous legitimation-problem I mentioned before, which is the result of this imbalance, and of a lack of democracy, and perhaps even more, a lack of identification between the European citizens and the people who rule the Union.   

Our task is not, what the announcement of this lecture suggested, to sell Europe. Our task is, on contrary, to be as critical as possible. Europe needs, more than ever, our critical voices. And our observations, indeed, in world of Brussels, but also in the worlds of Vasarobec and all the other places. We have to come and to go, from the institutional Europe to the Europe of European citizens, and we have to connect those worlds and we have to short circuit them, all the time. Only that combination gives us some idea of the real Europe, in all its complexities, but also in all its beauty, goodness and humanity.

Ladies and gentlemen,

‘What the rights and wrongs of this are, I don’t know,’ Martha Gellhorn wrote at the end of her letter. And her book was called ‘The trouble I have seen’. That’s our task in a nutshell, and it is an historic task.
Lawyers and bureaucrats strive after certainty, good journalists strive, just like historians, even more after understanding. We are working in a situation which is changing all the time and where new questions arise every day. We have to observe European life, political life, human life, and at the end our own life, as honest as possible, but  the temptations to look away are great. It is so easy to follow the flow of the virtual Europe, and to forget the people, and their faces, and their hands. 
But we should never forget who we are. We are spies on behalf of the European democracy, on behalf of the European citizens. Spies from the King.

Thank you very much.