EU Launches Propaganda Radio

A quote from EUobserver, 12 December 2007

Radio fans will from next year onwards be able to tune in to a new pan-European station, to be set up by a multinational group of broadcasters and funded by the European Commission.

The 'European Radio Project' (ERP) - a consortium of 16 radio stations from 13 member states - will from April 2008 onwards bring programmes "from a European point of view," [...] The project, to be officially signed off this Friday (14 December), will see the ERP group jointly producing daily half-an-hour EU "hard news" shows, weekly magazines and coverage of big European cultural events.

The programmes will be broadcast on the usual frequencies of the participating radio stations, as well as through a new ERP internet site, which will be in the air from June onwards.

Original content for the radio shows will initially be produced in five "core" languages [...]. More core languages and translated versions will be added in the coming years so that by 2012, all official 23 EU languages should be covered.

The euro-radio project will be primarily financed by the EU Commission, [...] The ERP consortium won the tender and will now pocket €5.8 million per year of subsidies for its pan-European shows, which comes down to a daily amount of € 15.890, commission sources said. [...]

The commission tender cites as aim of the radio project to "encourage the development of a European public area," with Brussels already subsidising the European TV news channel EuroNews to the tune of €5 million euro a year (increasing to € 10 million from next year onwards). [...]

The audience is estimated at 12 to 19 million daily listeners in the EU-27 plus around 30 million in the rest of the world. The consortium hopes to increase its EU audience to 30 million through marketing.

Obligatory payments

Those taxpayers who would be willing to finance these media outlets should declare such willingness. But in this socialist prison, people have nothing to say!