This article was prompted by the poor turnout for the 1999 European Parliament elections and the failure of MEPs since to address effectively key causes of electoral apathy. It focuses on the extent to which the Parliament’s press and information directorate, DG-III, and to a lesser extent, MEPs, are successful in handling their relationships with the mass media, given that the latter is a crucial means of communicating images of the Parliament to the electorate. Having unearthed serious inadequacies in the communication performance of the Parliament, the article investigates the causes of these and the likelihood of their being addressed.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=623025