Chaired by: Roger Köppel
Reported by: John Lloyd

[…] The internet and blogs have caught the rising as well as the risen generations and casting perhaps an even greater spell. Yet these two were seen as a danger to us; this time to newspaper and broadcasting people alike. The internet has spawned the blog and the blog composers (…) prejudice and polemic come out as a plant, one of the flowers of the enlightenment (…).Can it give to journalism a new dimension? One which replaces the monologue, the one-way monologues of newspapers and broadcast news and current affairs, with dialogue and debate and argument instead? […] Another crisis which speaks more to our subject that is the position of the media within Europe and about Europe. Our media is, of course, hugely polyglot. They are a diverse product of different cultures, politics and assumptions. So, these are generalisations. One such generalisation was – and it was frequently alluded to – that the media are actually rather powerless and the crises in Europe have shown this vividly. Why? Because in most of Europe journalists are part of an intellectual and political elite which had accepted and had believed in the European project and which assumed that their readers and viewers did so too. […] The media and the European project are increasingly out of pace with each other. In part because as the European project has concentrated on Europe the media have become increasingly globalised. In part also because the European project is inevitably institutional and idealistic. And the media have become ever more personalised, scandalous and cynical. […] And yet another: That the media have become leaner and meaner and less interested in foreign news. […]