ABSTRACT
The most common mistakes in European Union (EU) reporting are to give too much weight to the European Parliament's agenda-setting power. Some EU news is completely off the wall and lacks even that small grain of truth. They are not mistakes but fabrications. UK tabloids are the main arena for made-up EU news. The EU institutions and member countries share some of the blame for frequent errors in articles about the EU. The European Commission uses easily misunderstood jargon and actually suggests very strange laws sometimes. One of the EU's fundamental traits is its consensus culture. Journalists tend to report on the Council of Europe when their country has received a judgement from the human rights court or when one of the many monitoring bodies has published a report that includes praise or criticism. The European Court of Human Rights' rulings are binding, but it has no way of enforcing them.
