FOURTH ESTATE

For a professional class that prides itself on ‘holding power to account’ and pursuing the truth ‘without fear or favour’, journalists are surprisingly susceptible to flattery.

If you want to get on the good side of a hard-nosed investigative reporter, tell them how much you enjoyed their last article. They’ll be putty in your hands. Which goes to show that at the end of the day – as The Chattering Classes’ staff therapist likes to say – we all just want to be loved.

That’s especially true of the bruised and battered Brussels’ press corps, which suffers from a collective inferiority complex, mainly because back home few understand, or really care, what they report about.

No one understands how to harness the power of that kind of wounded pride better than American PR pros, which brings us to Burson’s ‘EU Media Poll’, an annual ranking of media “influence” in the EU bubble that makes everyone feel like a winner.

Burson presented it at a special event in its Brussels offices on Wednesday, followed by a media panel headlined by Sarah Wheaton of Politico.

As ever, this year’s big victor was US-based Politico, which according to US-based Burson is by far the most influential outlet in the EU, ahead of the UK’s FT, Reuters and The Economist, as well as Belgium’s own Euractiv.

The result was welcome news for Politico, which is going through a bit of a rough patch at the moment.

“We have been recognised for what sets us apart,” Goli Sheikholeslami, Politico’s Washington-based CEO crowed on LinkedIn. “These aren’t just observations but a reflection of the real impact of our work and the standards we uphold every day.”

Editors at both The Parliament Magazine (of ‘Magical Negro’ fame) and MLex, which placed 15th and 20th respectively, celebrated Burson’s finding that they were the only outlets “that saw their influence rise”.

Our favourite winner was Alejandro Tauber of EUObserver, which finished 7th, according Burson. In Tauber’s gematria, EUObserver actually placed 6th, which he detailed on LinkedIn. “Very proud of us, and many, many, many thanks to all contributors and readers,” he gushed before thanking the Academy and his parents.

To be fair, it’s quite an achievement for an outfit like EUObserver to outpace the likes of Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post in terms of influence.

Would that it were so. Though we at The Chattering Classes hate nothing more than being the bearers of bad tidings, we just can’t let this one slip…

The week before the Burson report was published, we were asked during a panel discussion what we made of these media influence polls and responded that we considered them to be “bullshit”.

The reason for our scepticism was that samples are usually tiny and the methodology, to put it charitably, less than robust.

We had no idea just how right we were. In the latest study, the research firm that carried out the poll for Burson, UK-based Savanta, surveyed just 21 MEPs out of 720. On the basis of those 21 submissions, the firm concluded that “an overwhelming 86% of MEPs consider Politico to be ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ influential”.

Burson’s entire sample for the polls included just 175 people, including 66 institution staff (out of a total 79,000) and 88 “opinion formers”, a category that includes journalists, business executives, lobbyists and other non-government groups.

To quote John McEnroe: You cannot be serious! The entire EU bubble consists of about 100,000 people and Burson is making sweeping claims on the influence of dozens of media outlets based on the testimony of 175 people.

It turns out we’re not the only ones questioning Burson’s interpretration of the poll’s findings. In an exclusive interview with our Magnus Lund Nielsen, the man who led the study for Burson acknowledged that some of the firm’s conclusions were not supported by the data.

“I don’t think that it necessarily represents the broader MEP opinions,” Chris Hopkins of Savanta, which undertook the study, said. “How they’ve interpreted the data, I think that may be a learning for us going forward.”

So many ‘learnings’. It would be easy to laugh this off and chalk it up to the interconnections between Burson, its UK-based parent WPP, and Politico and its German parent, Axel Springer.

Yet there’s nothing funny about it. The Burson poll is used by corporations and media buyers across the EU to make decisions about advertising and subscriptions. Politico staffers slap the results of the poll like a badge of honour to their email signatures. If the chief researcher thinks Burson has overstepped boundaries in interpreting his poll’s core findings, it should withdraw it forthwith.

BBC SLIMS DOWN IN BRUSSELS: With Brexit and the EU-UK summit out of the way, the BBC is operating with a reduced presence in Brussels, a newsroom that bustled with life during the divorce years. Only two on-camera correspondents are now based in the EU capital: Europe Editor Katya Adler and Nick Beake. That’s down from 4-5 a few years ago.

With Brits more enthralled by developments in the White House than by their European neighbours, the TV studio in the Beeb’s newsroom is gathering dust. A longstanding Flemish cameraman is chucking it in to become a policeman, and there’s not even a receptionist anymore. They’re looking at moving upstairs to smaller offices in the International Press Centre.

Former Bureau Chief Richard Colebourn has moved to Rome to take up a more senior position marshalling non-English language news coverage across the continent, such as a new Polish service. He’s been replaced by Kathy Long, who is set to get the bureau chief gig on a permanent basis.

In a sign that the BBC has not given up on Brussels – at least not as a money spinner – they are looking to hire a business person to sell media monitoring subscription to the EU institutions.

That’s it for this week. Remember: send tips to transom@euractiv.com.

Servus!