“Viele kleine Leute die in vielen kleinen Orten viele kleine Dinge tun koennen das Gesicht der Welt veraendern” (Many small people, who in many small places do many small things, can alter the face of the world).

That slogan scrawled on the Berlin Wall summed up the huge significance of the moment as thousands of jubilant East Germans scrambled on top of the Wall and hacked at it with pickaxes on the night of November 9, 1989. The message was that freedom of speech and political freedoms are inseparable. The people of Eastern Europe had, virtually as one, rejected the yoke of communist propaganda as well as political oppression, and chosen freedom. For the rest of the world, too, it was an inspiration, fresh proof that free speech and free media are vital building blocks of a free and open society and that they can overcome tyranny. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 and free media blossomed across the whole continent, it seemed as if the victory of free expression was complete. So it is a bitter disappointment now to survey the media landscape of Europe, both East and West, and find that the health and freedom of the media are in a weakened and, in parts, a severely debilitated state.

As next year’s 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall approaches there is still plenty to celebrate in terms of political freedoms and the possibility of pluralism. But the legal constraints and political and commercial pressures on the media have again grown intense and often insidious, especially in the East. Political leaders have grown bolder in making use of every means available to manipulate or control the media in order to consolidate their own power. It has happened not only in Russia, with the rise of Vladimir Putin and his entourage, and in other parts of the former Soviet Union, but also in Italy, where Silvio Berlusconi has just been returned to power yet again with his vast media and business empire mostly intact.

Meanwhile the harsh economics of the 21st century have forced many media outlets into a precarious existence, threatened by falling revenues and the rival, free attractions of the internet. Arne Koenig, chair of the European Federation of Journalists, has coined the term “forced-lancers”, instead of freelancers, to describe the army of media workers who are being forced by cost-cutting employers to operate without a full-time or staff job, making them more compliant and less able to resist pressures of all kinds.

A meltdown of commitments

The leaders of European institutions must face their responsibilities more honestly and exhibit genuine transparency as the EU moves inexorably in the direction of becoming a genuine pan-European government. The 294- page Lisbon Treaty due to come into force in January 2009 represents an enormous step towards such an administration. Yet Gisela Stuart, the Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, who played a central part in the convention that drew up the original EU Constitution, is just one of many who have pointed out that it is “patently dishonest” to pretend that the new Treaty differs substantially from the old one. European leaders have opted to conceal the truth – that the Lisbon Treaty contains virtually all the extensions of EU powers that were foreseen in the Constitution Treaty, covering both the internal and foreign policies of all member-states. Politicians have done this by deception out of fear of another rejection of the kind previously delivered by French and Dutch voters.

So British politicians and media alike are in for a rude shock as and when the Lisbon Treaty comes into effect. At a recent London Metropolitan University conference on the Treaty and the EU Parliament, Andrew Duff, the Liberal Democrat MEP, enthused about the prospect of “an upgraded high representative for foreign affairs and security with a single diplomatic service acting across the globe... and in areas of crime, race and immigration the progress we will make is going to be pretty dramatic and quick... I expect some startled people in Britain”. Then, with calculated irony, he added: “...especially if they bought the Westminster lie – sorry, I mean the Westminster line...”, alluding to claims that the new Treaty will not make much difference.

The British media, probably the most vigorous in Europe, need to raise their game to grasp the issues on behalf of the public and hold the fledgling European government to account, instead of being content with sniping and focusing on disputes and quarrels at home, or involving British ministers in Brussels. A great body of evidence about the general weakening of the European media, and their loss of authority and independence, has been published by organisations such as the Council of Europe, the OSCE, the International Press Institute, and Reporters Without Borders, but the media themselves have so far been slow to acknowledge problems in their own house and to set them right.

The two media freedom surveys* published in November 2007 and in February this year by the Association of European Journalists (AEJ) were written by active journalists in 20 countries, from Russia to France. Their conclusion is that a multitude of assaults and constraints have combined to drive press freedom into retreat in Europe. They include physical violence and even murder, intimidation, manipulation, censorship and enforced self-censorship. National governments are responsible for an array of increasingly restrictive laws that can criminalise the work of journalists and limit their rights and access to information, but the AEJ also questions the record of the European Union institutions, finding that they have failed to show sufficient respect for freedom of media and freedom of expression, especially when journalists and cartoonists were threatened over the Danish Muhammad cartoons row in 2006.

Three recent cases illustrate the range and seriousness of the threats, and their chilling effect on the climate in which journalists in Europe work.

● Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in her Moscow apartment block in October 2006 while preparing to expose, in her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, evidence of official torture in Chechnya. The murder of the best-known journalistic critic of the Putin power system drew world attention to the climate of intimidation and danger endured by other critical Russian journalists. But the lack of clarity in bringing suspects to trial has highlighted the lack of independence of the Russian courts and the impunity of the journalist-killers. Since then more Russian journalists have met violent deaths. Russian laws give the authorities sweeping powers to close down any news organisation deemed to be propagating “extremism”. President Putin’s own attitude to inquisitive journalists was apparent in 2002, when he took offence at a question from a French journalist about Russia’s policies towards Muslims. Vladimir Putin publicly invited him to get circumcised in Moscow, adding: “I will recommend that they carry out the operation in such a way that nothing grows back.” Journalists have witnessed several such crude outbursts from Putin at press conferences and I have yet to see any European leader have the courage to comment that such foul and threatening language is out of order. Russia is now blocking urgently-needed reforms to the European Court of Human Rights aimed at clearing the backlog of thousands of cases in which citizens of Russia and the 46 other member-states are seeking redress from their own governments for alleged violations of their rights.

● In April 2008, the nationalist-minded government in Slovakia passed a law which would tend to stifle critical reporting by granting an automatic right of reply to anyone mentioned in a printed article to contest the contents of the report, even if the published material is true and allegations can be defended as being in the public interest. The move has been harshly criticised internationally, but Slovakia continues openly to flout the rules of the Council of Europe, the continent’s official human rights watchdog, even though it currently holds the Council’s rotating presidency. This is the latest of many instances of arbitrary laws and authoritarian treatment of the media in countries of the former Eastern bloc.

● Hans-Martin Tillack, the Brussels correspondent for Stern magazine, was detained by Belgian police who, in 2004, raided his home and took away computers and papers after he published reports alleging fraud at Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office. The journalist was wrongly accused of paying an official for confidential documents. In late 2007 he finally won an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights and was awarded compensation. Tillack accuses the EU’s anti-fraud department, OLAF, which originally passed his file to the police, of being more eager to find the source of an embarrassing leak than to face up to the abuses he had uncovered. It was allegations of cronyism that led to the resignation of the whole European Commission in 1999.

The AEJ surveys confirmed that no shared European “demos” yet exists in terms of how people in European countries access news and form political opinions. But new limitations on media freedom are seen everywhere. The other main points of the survey included:

National security laws: Tougher laws affecting journalists have been adopted across Europe in response to the increased threat of terrorism. In nine European countries journalists have recently been prosecuted under secrecy laws. Phone-tapping of the media has grown more common and harder to challenge. Journalists’ rights to protect their sources are being placed in fresh doubt – Irish Times editor Geraldine Kennedy and reporter Colm Keena are now awaiting a High Court ruling to find out whether they will be fined or even face jail for refusing to reveal the source of material related to corruption allegations concerning the then Taioseach, Bertie Ahern.

The politicisation of public broadcasting: In the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, control over the editorial line of public TV and radio is easy and has come to be treated as among the usual spoils of election victories by parties of the Right and Left. In Poland, under the recently-ousted Right-wing government, its critics were systematically blacklisted. Serious political bias has been exposed in Austria, Italy and other West European countries.

Concentration of media ownership: Globalisation has largely pushed traditional family owners and other long-standing media champions out of the European marketplace. After the latest round of lay-offs at Le Monde, France faces the prospect of every one of its major national newspaper titles falling prey to the ownership or sway of big business interests, some with close ties to the Sarkozy government or the President himself. French journalists complain of censorship over the sacking of an editor of Paris Match and the spiking of newspaper coverage concerning Nicolas Sarkozy’s then wife, Cecilia, during the 2007 presidential election campaign.

Media dumbing down: Public trust in the media has fallen thanks to perceptions of media sensationalism, the blurring of news and entertainment, and general complaints about falling editorial standards. That last finding mirrors the results of a survey about the perceived honesty of various groups conducted this year by the European Centre for Public Affairs, whose members include corporations, NGOs, trade associations and consultants. It found that three-quarters of those working in public affairs believe that journalists “sensationalise rather than report issues”. Barely 5 per cent of respondents professed to trust journalists “a great deal”, while 25 per cent trusted journalists “not at all”, making journalists the least trusted profession among those listed.

Press stories derided

But the BBC now runs compulsory courses on the EU for all its journalists. It has the largest bureau in Brussels of any news organisation, turning out work of high quality. Europe Today on the BBC World Service is perhaps the best daily radio programme on European affairs to be heard anywhere. As for the Financial Times, a senior Commission official once remarked that after days of confusing meetings with various officials, the best way to find out what had really happened was to read the FT. And Juergen Kroenig, the veteran UK correspondent of the German paper Die Zeit, told a Polis seminar at the LSE recently that the widespread hostility on the mainland to the British way of covering EU affairs was misplaced. British writers, he said, “are the ones who most closely reflect the mindset of European populations as a whole”.

The European Commission has a formal system of daily press conferences, and swift internet publication of documents that is extremely open by world standards. Yet the president of the International Press Association in Brussels, Lorenzo Consoli, representing the world’s largest press corps, complains of a growing trend for the Commission to control the output of the media by avoiding controversial issues and spinning positive, pre-digested stories. He argues that the Commission should initiate EUwide legislation for the protection of journalistic sources, learning its lessons from the Tillack case. Consoli also says that senior EU figures, including those in the European parliament, and the foreign policy chief Javier Solana, were too timid in the face of expressions of outrage from Muslim leaders at the time of the cartoons row. They should make clear that “there can be no compromise on the fundamental right to freedom of expression”, he insists.

The many-sided assaults on media freedom have compounded what was already a complex and daunting task – to report Europe adequately – and journalists still struggle to find the vocabulary to describe the unique hybrid nature of the European Union. On Europe’s stage, things are often not what they seem. The EU has contradictory features – at various times a vehicle for cementing French and German political supremacy in Europe; an idealistic project to secure common high standards for the lives of 500 million Europeans; and a bureaucracy with wide powers to regulate and coerce Europeans to obey its laws. It is time that national governments came clean about the realities of the EU, the fierce national rivalries that are still played out inside its meetings, and the limits of their own ability to manage its huge administrative and governmental machine. It is time, too, for the media to stop being embarrassed about Europe and to find new ways of telling a complex and vitally important story. For that, one of the first tasks must be to win back the media freedom and independence that has been dangerously eroded.

* The Association of European Journalists survey, Goodbye to Freedom? (November 2007) and survey update, Goodbye to Media Freedom? (February 2008), are both on www.aej-uk.org. The European Centre for Public Affairs survey is on www.comres.co.uk.