From the blog of the European Commissioner Margot Wallström (check here for the full post):

Yesterday I announced, alongside the Presidents of Deutsche Welle and Radio France Internationale, the launch of a European radio network which I hope will provide a substantial contribution towards creating a European public sphere. Most people still get their information via TV and radio, but in the absence of international TV and radio stations it is difficult to generate debate across national and linguistic borders.

That is why I believe networks are the way forward. This one, under the working title, European Radio Project, brings together 16 radio stations from 13 countries, broadcasting in 10 languages. They will produce and share material on EU current affairs, debate, analysis etc. Their brief includes making the views of European citizens known outside their own countries and show how particular issues are addressed in different Member States.

Europe needs an European public opinion and you cannot have that without allowing Europeans to access to an everyday based common bulk of information. I have been saying this for years.

However this is not so easy to achieve: the problem was, and still is, the language. For this reason I thought that it could have been easier to start from Europe-wide spread newspapers with the same news in all EU official languages every day. This would have brought to an increase in costs but it would have been balanced by an increase in market scale.

Newspapers seemed to me better then radio or TV to start with. This was because newspapers do not transmit live so there is no need for simultaneous translation bringing costs to a little decrease. I also emailed this idea to some Italian politicians (I found their addresses on the web) maybe three years ago, when I got used to blogs I wrote of that here and there (if I remember well also in a comment on Wallström’s blog), but I never saw an European newspaper…

Of course I am not so naive of thinking that a couple of emails or blog comments can really make such a kind of project start up, but I think anyway that they can make people a little more sensitive to the issue.

Now it seems that something is moving by itself and this means that the problem is real and that presently known possible solutions are not so many (this kind of situation brings many people to have more or less the same view about the same topic). They will start with radio, not newspapers, but that’s good anyway (maybe better). I am curious to see how they will actually implement the project, nevertheless just because of being the first actual starting in this field it will be good.