There were no black ties and no fawning, but an impressive number of entries that have changed the world for the better
The Oscars pull you up short. "Does anyone else find the wall-to-wall coverage repellent? Vapid fawning over celebrities masquerading as news," tweeted the Guardian's fulminator-in-chief, George Monbiot. Quite right. Too many designer dresses; too much hollow harrumphing over this year's presenter and off-colour jokes; too little honesty in an ocean of puff stuff. Plus a feeling, yet again, that Hollywood has made us all bit players in a media world where power – and markets and money – homogenise lives.
How did British actors get so good at American accents, even at playing iconic American presidents? Because that's where the paycheques are. Watch our TV stars beat the path to Beverly Hills. Why do some of the most dynamic on- and offline newspapers cross the Atlantic at a bound, so that the correspondents they employ there hugely outnumber those they keep to report Britain outside the M25 – and even across the whole of Europe? Because size matters. It's where the future of scale and opportunity lies.
The Daily Mail claims that it's Earth's most popular newspaper online, formidably revered in the US – and busy hiring new staff there. The Guardian has gone the same route with striking user success. Look at the latest digital circulation figures and you'll find that 81,201,000 of the Mail's record-busting 126,753,000 unique browsers in January came from outside the UK; the Guardian had 49,481,000 international uniques in its own 77,931,000 record.
But there's also a gritty question lurking here. Does Fleet Street as a whole rarely stray north of Watford because nobody wants to read what happens in that non-metropolitan hinterland? Is Europe closed for reporting business because it's a collection of faraway lands of which (Bunga-Bunga Berlusconi apart) we choose to know little? I went to the first European Press Prize ceremony in Amsterdam last week. The winners: a formidable Danish investigation of espionage, a battling Greek columnist, a Ukrainian daily making repeated waves – and Paul Lewis of the Guardian for his massively orchestrated analysis of the British riots.
Yet, in a way, the most significant thing was the cluster of brilliant entries – from 32 countries – that came so close to winning too. Take Miranda Patrucic in Sarajevo, masterminding the Project on Organised Crime and Corruption and tracing proxy companies and massive huge scams from Lithuania to New Zealand and back. Take the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network explaining, in forensic detail, just where and how to buy yourself EU citizenship. Take Lukas Hassig lifting the lid on Swiss banks and finding retired cops inside doing a dirty trade in secret information. Who pulled the tax rug from under Starbucks? Tom Bergin of Reuters. Who changed the whole course of the Breivik mass-slaughter trial in Norway? Torry Pedersen's VG newspaper, daring to publish confidential medical reports on Anders Breivik that gripped a traumatised nation.
It wasn't a black tie event. Most of us didn't wear ties at all. But there was singular, unbuttoned emotion in the speeches and conversations that flowed – along with a sense of place and time and reality. The countries of this prize's Europe are a jigsaw of different tongues, histories and traditions. If this (as somebody hinted) one day turns out to be Europe's Pulitzers, we'll have mountains of understanding to climb. But be clear that there are already terrific stories – and scandals that touch us all – in a continent where media market forces have to struggle to survive. Did Beyoncé lip-sync at the inauguration? Was Seth MacFarlane too horrid to Oscar's half-dressed starlets? Who on Earth on Earth cares in Barnsley – or Budapest?
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