This article analyses an event – the end, in 1999, of a relational system between the European Commission and the international press corps in Brussels – from a configurational perspective. Until then, this system was articulated around three components: a mechanism designed by Commission officials and partly co-managed with accredited journalists, a restricted corps of correspondents personally invested in European construction, and inter-professional transactions based on close mutual acquaintance. While maintaining itself for nearly three decades, this relational configuration underwent a series of transformations that accelerated in the second half of the 1990s: post-Maastricht politicisation of the Commission, massification of the press corps, diversification of media supply and formats (audiovisual, specialised pure-players), Brussels “lobby boom” and rise of Euroscepticism. The 1999 “crisis” signals the obsolescence of a media-political relationship conceived as a small world bound by axiological convergence. More significantly, it reveals a more structural reconfiguration of the European regime. The shift to live broadcasting of Commission briefings marks both the end of institutional journalism and a new threshold of politicisation in European affairs.
ALDRIN et al. (Wed,) studied this question.