A recent report has exposed the European commission guilty of bribing journalist to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars for favourable coverage. How long can this go on?

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A recent report has exposed the European commission guilty of bribing journalist to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars for favourable coverage. How long can this go on?

While we witness the continuation of the European Commission chief’s anti-democratic control over the project but also a host of values like freedom of speech, a Brussels Eurosceptic think tank has revealed that the project bribes journalists for favourable coverage. In a recent report, MCC claimed that the EU was secretly pumping at least 80m euros a year into both print and broadcast outlets often under the guise of fighting fake news.

Yet the figure of 80m euros is wildly underestimated and in reality is likely to be three or four times this as the accountability and transparency of such payments are unsurprisingly buried in opaque accountancy practices with both the EU and media outlets themselves unwilling to be open to their readers/viewers.

Funding programmes are often presented using buzzwords like “fighting disinformation” or “promoting European integration” yet the reality is that it is a fund which is simply there to push propaganda for the project itself.

The truth is that the European commission in particular is advancing with a strategy to bribe media giants more and more to promote the EU with its tainted narrative. Ironically, it is Ursula von der Leyen who often talks about “facts” being important. Her pretence that she believes in the truth and an independent press is in itself an illusion on a grand scale and perhaps the greatest example of what “fake news” itself is, on the EU circuit. Just recently, the irony of her being close to losing her job as commission president gave her the opportunity to give us all a good laugh.

“Facts matter, the truth matters”, she said recently in her speech to the EU Parliament, just before a vote of no confidence was held against her. She said – stop laughing – she was willing to engage in debate — provided it was based on “facts” and “arguments”.

Yet there has never been an EU commission president who believes and benefits more in the dark art of bunging journalists and media more than Ursula. Indeed, the very media outlets who rushed to her defence when she was facing the jaws of defeat by a group of Eurosceptic MEPs recently are fake news outfits which have been receiving millions of euros of cash in brown envelopes for decades.

“Von der Leyen successfully defends against no-confidence vote and attacks right-wing extremists”, thundered Der Spiegel, while Deutsche Welle (DW) reported a failure by the right: “Right-wing extremists fail with no-confidence motion against von der Leyen”.

“Right-wing extremists”? Really?

Perhaps it’s worth noting that DW, to date, has received around 35m euros from the EU slush fund, according to the Hungarian think tank’s report which is compiled by Thomas Fazi, an Italian hack whose work is published on Unherd and who recently has published impressive investigations into the salami sliced power grab that the EU has been executing from member states. Ursula, of course, plays a pivotal role in that, as does corrupt media outlets like Deutsche Welle which is so spectacularly shite that its own German language service had to be shut down as no Germans would watch such gobbledygook garbage which champions the EU and Germany’s foreign policy ambitions.

This slush fund, aimed at boosting the EU’s status and relevance, has been around for quite a while but the report was revealing as it explains exactly how the European Commission goes about distributing the cash.

Traditionally, a big way the EU gets artificially positive coverage from Brussels events is via broadcasters. Outfits like DW, Euronews and most of the major state broadcasters across the EU benefit from a subsidy here, whereby the European Commission, European parliament and other institutions like the Council of Ministers provide filming, editing and studio facilities at their state of the art studios which, themselves, are a murky pit of corruption and embezzlement on a grand scale. These “studios” provide everything for national broadcasters who have “correspondents” in Brussels. TV production, particularly on location is expensive. The EU pays for everything saving state broadcasters like DW millions in production costs which is of course paid back by coverage from the outlet not only with a positive EU spin but often simply replicating the EU narrative. It’s propaganda on a level which would make Goebbels proud as the genius of it is that the relationship which forms between the broadcasters and the EU grows each day until the point where both realise they need one another more than they have previously realised. The result is that so-called “news events” in Brussels which are so boring and would never normally see the light of day if the editors back in Berlin, Paris or Rome would have their say, get air time. And quite a bit of it.

What the report didn’t cover was the contracts themselves with the private companies which run the studios who employ scores of technical staff. Curiously perhaps, it is the same Belgian company which gets the contract every six years when the budget is completed despite EU rules making this impossible. All the Belgian firm does is simply change its name. Corruption of course has to be the heart of this. Someone in the EU commission is getting a huge commission for this of course.

For newspapers, there is less money involved but the naked lust to push its own fake news is apparent, none the less with those who can really promote the EU and raise its profile favoured the most. According to the MCC investigation, the Information Measures for the EU Cohesion Policy (IMREG) programme has financed around €40 million since 2017 to media outlets and news agencies to produce content highlighting the “benefits” of EU policy. The report highlights examples where this funding is not clearly disclosed, effectively amounting to “stealth marketing” or “covert propaganda”.

Projects with Italian newspapers Il Sole 24 Ore (€290,000 awarded, with articles on EU funds’ positive impact lacking clear disclosure on the website) and La Repubblica (€260,000 awarded, with only a tiny EU logo on the project banner) are just two examples the investigation identifies.

A recent article by a German journalist has gone further and identified clear examples how EU cash given the media outlets is used expressly to generate fake news about events even beyond the EU’s borders, citing the report.

Franz Becchi of the German outlet Berliner Zeitung explained recently that EU cash used to buy favourable coverage even recently reached Ukraine.

“In geopolitically sensitive topics like the Russia-Ukraine conflict, media outlets receiving such funding may be incentivised to echo official EU and NATO positions” he writes. “In the past year alone, the EU allocated around €10 million to Ukrainian media” he adds.

The EU has become so brazen about its murky practices that it barely tries to hide the bribery which is going on. Even the names of the programs spell it out.

A program aptly called, “Journalism Partnerships”, has provided nearly €50 million since 2021.

Newspapers also receive considerable advertising revenue from the EU which uses these outlets to promote swanky Brussels “events”. Brussels consultancies also use their own slush funds provided by EU contracts for “publishing” promotional material to take out advertisements in EU publications. For years this was the case with the now defunct Economist-owned “European Voice” which sold almost no copies but was allowed a unique special access to EU officials addresses for its weekly print run “dump”. Its only income was via Brussels based think tanks, trade associations and consultancies who regularly took out full page advertisements. Perhaps unsurprisingly, its two last editors, took cushy, well paid jobs…yes, you’ve guessed it, in the media department of the European Commission.

For the big news agencies one might think that it would be harder to stuff cash into journalists’ pockets, or at least their owners. Not quite.

News agencies, in particular, are involved in several murky media initiatives. According to the report, in 2024, about €1.7 million was allocated under the “Multimedia Actions” program to establish the European Newsroom (ENR). It is claimed that this so-called “newsroom” brings together news agencies from 24 countries to produce and disseminate content related to EU affairs. These agencies — including AFP (France), EFE (Spain), Ansa (Italy), Belga (Belgium) – feed national newspapers with copy which of course has a strong EU slant and whose claims made by the European Commission are never verified.

Perhaps more worryingly is that many major news outlets are so ensconced in the EU sphincter and its fake news, that many have lost all contact with the discipline of news reporting and have become mere extensions of the EU propaganda machine. Some of these agencies are so on board with any preposterous propaganda schemes the EU can cook up that they even help Brussels shut down any examples of old-fashioned zealous journalism which might on occasion rear its heads in the member states themselves, presumably outlets which aren’t on the EU payroll.

Hold yourself from hurting your sides from giggling, but the EU actually has its own agency which finds journalists and outlets who report on it objectively. It names and shames them as “fake news” outlets and even has big media agencies who help it with its work.

The European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), which supports networks to combat disinformation, has received at least €27 million over the past five years — a domain closely linked to the promotion of pro-EU narratives, MCC claims. The outfit presumably monitors thousands of websites on an hourly basis and when it finds articles which don’t follow the script and perhaps asks awkward questions, it sets the dogs on them. France’s AFP are one of those agencies who have signed up to the program.

Even the EU Parliament itself, whose small band of right-wing MEPs recently brought about the no confidence vote against darling Ursula, has sullied hands from greasing the palms of media. The MCC report claims that it dished out nearly €30 million for media campaigns since 2020. This funding aimed, among other goals, to “increase outreach to target audiences” and “boost legitimacy for EP campaigns”, particularly ahead of European elections. In plain English “bribe journalists to write about stuff leading up to EU elections” so as to assure a reasonable turn out. What it should be doing of course, now that it is licking its wounds after the mob of the EU elite and its gang of media outlets have smeared the MEPs behind the recent Ursula stunt, is campaigning for much more transparency when it comes to cash being given to journalists – perhaps an on screen logo for all journalists who do their “pieces to camera” in front of EU institutions, or an EU flag on all content which has received EU money for its coverage. Such a program needs a name, a decent paper written about its importance, a good number of MEPs who support it and, of course, media support. The more that the EU pushes this farcical program it has to pay cash for its own favourable coverage – not to mention its own fake news watchdog – the greater the case for accountability for the media who sign up to its tawdry deal. The chances of that happening though are about the same as Ursula turning up at a plenary session in one of her grandparents’ Waffen SS uniforms while doing the John Cleese infamous Hitler walk. MCC would be probably the only outfit in Brussels who could pull it off. Such a program should simply be called U.R.S.U.L.A.