 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Press interest in the first meetings of the Council of Europe was understandably huge. It was said that nearly 500 journalists were in Strasbourg to cover the Assembly’s inaugural session, 33 personnel from the BBC alone, while French national radio broadcast the first two sittings of the Assembly live. For the local press, merely the appearance in Strasbourg of Churchill, when his post-war prestige was at its apogee, was enough to elicit great excitement. One paper even splashed his trademark “V” sign across a whole page devoted largely to his achievements.
Coverage of the debates was marked by “moderate optimism”, according to a review prepared at the time by the Council’s fledgling press service: nobody expected the new Assembly to resolve Europe’s problems in its first weeks, but a good start had been made. There was admiration for the Assembly’s early moves to organise itself, and a flurry of interest in its tussles with its sister body, the Committee of Ministers. The Times of London – echoing the line of the British government at the time – even remarked that “the Assembly must remember that it exists to advise, not to act”.
Other reports focused on the question of Germany, and later on the Assembly’s seminal debates on a future political organisation, and on protecting human rights. Maurice Edelman, in the New Statesman, remarked on the Assembly’s “confident and energetic mood”, while the Swiss essayist Denis de Rougement, writing in the Revue de Paris, summed up the proceedings simply: “What has taken place gives us hope.”
