It might be a little hard to describe the practices described in this Daily Telegraph article as unsavory and sleazy efforts to buy off the press, but whatever you choose to call them (come to think of it, ‘unsavory’ and ‘sleazy’ will do very nicely), they seem immune from the need for budgetary restraint:

Journalists’ expenses will be paid if they accompany the European Commission president on foreign trips, in a new public relations drive which will cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of euros.

 

Jose Manuel Barroso, the former Portuguese prime minister, will also have a photographer and television producer available 24 hours a day, as well as the services of a team of four speechwriters to call on at all times, under the new strategy to boost his media and political profile.

The new measures to “personalise” his image were revealed in a leaked letter written by Viviane Reding, the Justice Commissioner, who is in charge of EU communications… The EU has already come under fire for spending more than €8 million euros on entertaining, “training” and “informing” individual journalists last year, and devoted particular attention to those from Ireland in the run up to that country’s referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.