Press release
CIRCOM Regional and the European Parliament cooperate on the regional public media coverage of the EU Elections
Presidents Tajani and Kataja-Rahko signed an agreement that recognizes the importance of regional public media to secure a democratic and culturally di-verse society
Strasbourg, 24 October 2018. The President of CIRCOM Regional, Jyri Kataja-Rahko, and the President of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, signed today a Memo-randum of Understanding on media coverage of the European Elections aimed at facilitating for the regional Public Service Media balanced debate and discussion about European issues so that they can be explained to the citizens.
The European Parliament and CIRCOM Regional both recognize the important role of regional Public Service Media in elections in informing citizens about competing political parties, their programmes and candidates, and contributing to the formation of opinion of the electorate at the regional level.
The agreement states that “regional media is of enormous importance to the many regional societies that form the countries of Europe. It provides a number of essential safeguards to enable these societies to function properly and is part of the democratic process itself. Independent professional public service regional media organizations contribute to securing a democratic and culturally diverse society”.
The contributions of CIRCOM. To support its members in order to access the main debates and the leading candidates during the EU elections campaign and to organ-ize workshops for journalists in order to examine how to tackle European issues in an interesting manner for audiovisual media or social media platforms. This all with the help of the European Parliament and preserving every media’s editorial independ-ence.
Jyri Kataja-Rahko said “We take this opportunity with the European Parliament to help citizens to be more involved in the Elections campaign and in the political dis-cussion. We can do it because the regional media is the closest to the citizens and is everywhere across Europe, representing the European cultural diversity. This is a good way to cooperate with the European Parliament because we do it keeping our editorial independence. In this time of fake news the regional public media is trustful for citizens”.
Antonio Tajani said “Regional media play a crucial role in the run-up to the Europe-an Elections to link the European decisions to what matters to people locally. I am therefore glad that CIRCOM has expressed their interest to raise awareness of the European Elections campaign. The strong outreach of regional media will be key to inform citizens about how important their vote is to strengthen European democracy”.
Other participants from CIRCOM Regional, Fernando R. Ojea, Secretary General; Françoise Erb, Deputy Secretary General.
Other participants from the European Parliament, Jaume Duch, Director General for Communication; Fernando Carbajo, Head of the Audiovisual Unit.
CIRCOM Regional is the association of 250 regional public service media stations from 32 European countries. It also represents 11.000 regional journalists, 1.700 hours of news programmes each week, 100 different TV broadcasts in regional or minority languages and a daily reach of millions of TV viewers, radio listeners and online consumers.
The European Elections will be held on 23-26 May 2019.
