Six hours. One quote. A specific, familiar brand of Brussels exhaustion that I have apparently, somewhere along the way, made a kind of uneasy peace with.
Sat through a genuinely marathon six-hour European Council press briefing today, the kind that starts with genuine promise and gradually dissolves into a familiar kind of institutional fog somewhere around hour three, and emerged with exactly one usable quote for tomorrow’s piece, a ratio that would sound genuinely alarming described to anyone outside this specific press corps, and that I have, somewhere across several years covering this particular beat, come to treat as entirely ordinary rather than any kind of personal professional failure.
The briefing itself covered a genuinely significant set of ongoing negotiations, the kind of substantive policy discussion that, in principle, should have produced considerably more than a single quotable line across six full hours of official statements and follow-up questions. What actually happened, in practice, was the specific, well-worn Brussels pattern I have watched play out many times before, careful, heavily workshopped official language designed explicitly to signal movement without actually committing to anything specific enough to generate a genuine headline, delivered by spokespeople whose entire professional skill set is built around precisely this kind of studied, deliberate vagueness.
I think there is a genuine craft to Brussels press briefing language that deserves more direct acknowledgment than it usually gets, a specific, honed skill at producing several minutes of grammatically complete, superficially substantive-sounding statements that, examined closely afterward, actually commit to almost nothing concrete enough to be held against later. I have started, somewhat morbidly, keeping a private list of the specific phrases that reliably signal this kind of studied vagueness, “constructive discussions,” “further reflection needed,” “broad convergence of views,” phrases that appear in some combination in nearly every single briefing I have covered this year, regardless of the actual underlying subject matter.
The one usable quote I did manage to extract today came not from the formal briefing itself but from a considerably more candid, off-the-record aside from a junior official during the post-briefing scrum, exactly the kind of genuinely useful, unguarded moment that experienced Brussels correspondents learn to actively hunt for once the formal briefing itself has predictably failed to produce anything genuinely quotable. That specific skill, extracting real information from the margins of an event explicitly designed to minimize exactly that kind of extraction, is, I think, a genuinely underappreciated part of this particular beat’s actual craft.
I mentioned today’s six-hour, one-quote ratio to a colleague who has covered this beat considerably longer than I have, expecting some sympathy, and instead got a genuinely funny response, that today’s ratio was actually better than her own personal average, a comment that helped considerably more than I expected in terms of recalibrating my own sense of whether today represented a genuinely unproductive day or simply an entirely ordinary one by this specific beat’s own peculiar standards.
I am filing tomorrow’s piece around that single, hard-won quote, built out with considerably more context and analysis than the quote itself technically requires, exactly the kind of piece this specific beat has taught me to write reliably even on days when the actual raw material available is this genuinely thin. Six hours, one quote, and an entire professional skill set built around making that ratio somehow produce something readers can actually use. I think that is, properly understood, the whole strange craft of this particular job.
I have started, over the past year, keeping a running private glossary of exactly this kind of deliberately vague official phrasing, partly out of genuine professional interest and partly, I will admit, as a small, private way of finding some humor in a genuinely exhausting institutional pattern. Rereading it tonight, alongside today’s entry, I count close to forty distinct phrases now, each one deployed with remarkable consistency across briefing after briefing, regardless of the specific policy area under discussion, a genuinely impressive, if faintly dispiriting, testament to how thoroughly this particular institutional communication style has been standardized across the entire Brussels press apparatus.
I suspect I will keep adding to that glossary for as long as I cover this beat, and I have started, half-jokingly, telling newer colleagues on the press corps to start their own version early, since recognizing these specific phrases quickly is, in my own experience, one of the more genuinely useful survival skills this particular job actually requires, allowing you to mentally file away the studied vagueness and focus your actual attention on hunting for whatever genuine information might still be extractable from the margins of an otherwise carefully unproductive six hours.
One newer colleague, hearing about the glossary for the first time tonight, asked whether I ever worry that cataloguing this pattern this closely has made me unfairly cynical about the institution as a whole, unable to hear even a genuinely substantive statement without immediately, reflexively scanning it for studied vagueness. It is a fair question, and one I do not think I have a fully comfortable answer to. I suspect the honest truth is somewhere between healthy professional pattern recognition and a genuine, accumulated cynicism I should probably keep actively checking against, rather than simply accepting as an unavoidable cost of doing this job well.
More from this author at Charline Vanhoenacker, prat.uk.