Living with Press Eurotrash

Abstract

Jim Dougal, head of the European Commission in the United Kingdom, claims that Europe is constantly misrepresented in the British press. "Ever since the UK joined the Common Market in 1973, tales have abounded of an overweening bureaucracy attempting to wrest control of Britain "into its own hands", he writes. "Continual warnings of 'barmy EU edicts' issued by 'faceless eurocrats', which have surreptitiously impinged upon British life to deleterious effect, have been the mainstay of EU reporting in much of the UK press. Indeed, were every portentous prediction to have come to fruition we would now be living in a kind of Orwellian dystopia."