That's the EU loyalist line but look at the comments in this thread. Tons of people saying, yeah, old news, EU money is corrupt and distorting, why is this suddenly in the NYT? But notice how they're all people reporting personal experiences. They're not linking to investigative journalism. That's because journalists largely refuse to report on this kind of thing ... except in the UK where the EU is actually held to account by the press.

The EU routinely claims any criticism of itself is a lie, a myth, made up etc. But it's not the case.

The Commission actually had a huge blog dedicated to rebutting the "myths" as they put it, from the British press. But if you examine the posts you'll see many of them admit the stories were actually true. They aren't myths at all - that is itself a lie!

For instance:

https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/the-european-developmen...

The attitude on display here sums up EU grant awards in a nutshell. A story about a wasteful grant to train trapeze artists in Africa (wtf) is described as "the press chose to ridicule circus artists and coconut production"! No, the press was ridiculing the EU. The rest of the answer to this "euromyth" is stating the funding did happen but it was all for a good cause so that's ok.

Or this one about agricultural grant budget going up and fraud levels being high.

https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/cap-subsidies-are-they-...

The story is primarily about fraud, asking why the EU can't stop it. The Commission's response to this "euromyth" is that it's not their job to ensure the subsidies aren't gamed, which is hardly a rebuttal.