Press Freedom Is Under Attack in Europe — Can a European Media Freedom Act Turn the Tide in Time?

“It’s been a decade of more and more government control over media being established.” While the Act might indicate a more proactive attitude toward media, but for any real impact to be felt, “that pattern would have to change.”

Feature image by Michael Fousert

With its world-class living standards, long democratic record, and rigorous commitment to personal freedoms, the European Union is for many a paragon of prosperity and stability. Peaceful to the point of staidness, its 27 member states dominate indices that measure the quality of its democracy and the well-being of its citizens; the bloc is the world’s largest contributor of foreign aid and sets global standards for social and environmental policy.

It may come as a surprise, then, that press freedom in Europe is far from universally guaranteed. According to the latest Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), an advocacy group, EU countries differ widely in measures of media plurality, transparency, and freedom from self-censorship, suppression, and violence. Although the EU is indeed well-represented in the index’s top tier, with member states taking nine of the top 15 positions, not all of the bloc performs well. Poland and Hungary, where authoritarian governments have hollowed out independent media over the last several years, are ranked 64th and 92nd respectively, out of 180. Bulgaria ranks lowest, at 112th.

Speaking to Study Hall, Laurens Hueting, a senior advocacy officer at the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, a non-profit based in Leipzig, outlines three main areas of concern for press freedom in Europe. The first is violence against journalists. A report by the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, found that more than 900 media personnel had been attacked in 23 member states in 2020 alone, and that nearly three-quarters of female journalists had faced online abuse. It also tracked an uptick of violence in recent years, noting that, of the 23 journalists murdered in the EU since 1992, a majority had been killed since 2016. Many of them, such as Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta and Ján Kuciak in Slovakia, had been reporting on organised crime and corruption. Some of these cases are “at risk of developing into impunity cases, if they haven’t already,” says Hueting. The RSF, too, has noted worsening conditions for Europe’s journalists, writing last year that “Europe continues to be the most favourable continent for press freedom, but violence against journalists has increased,” pointing to a range of growing problems, including arbitrary arrests, anti-press laws, and political control of the media, in countries as diverse as Hungary, France, and Greece.

The second is legal threats against journalists, particularly in the form of strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs. SLAPPs are spurious complaints filed by corporations, wealthy private individuals, and government figures against those who publicly criticise them, such as reporters, activists, and political opponents. Plaintiffs in SLAPP cases, usually well-funded and well-connected, hope that the cost and complexity of going to court will intimidate their opponents into silence. SLAPPs have become a favoured tool of press suppression for powerful political and business figures in Europe: Galizia, Malta’s foremost investigative journalist, was facing 42 civil libel suits at the time of her assassination.

The third, Hueting concludes, is state capture, particularly in Hungary and Poland, where governments are “trying to establish a pro-government media apparatus” by directly or indirectly purchasing independent media houses and forcing their coverage to fall into line. That failing, these governments also resort to intimidation and legal wrangling to push critical media offline.

The Commission’s senior leadership is worried by the situation. In April last year, Thierry Breton, who oversees governance of the European single market, decried what he called “a growing and worrying politicisation of the media” in some European countries. Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission’s president, has identified the defence of a free and transparent media industry as a key priority, while Vera Jourová, in charge of the values-and-transparency portfolio, has warned that “attempts by governments and private groups to put pressure on the media” risked damaging democracy.

The Commission has put forward a proposal to introduce a European Media Freedom Act to shore up press freedom and pluralism by introducing consequences for member states who interfere with independent media for political gain. Scheduled to be presented to the European Parliament and the Council of Europe – the EU bodies that must approve Commission proposals before they can become law – in the third quarter of this year, the Act is now open for public consultation. The consultation is focused on gathering information about the transparency and independence of media markets, views on the conditions required for their “healthy functioning”, and feedback on how fairly governments allocate resources to the media — for example through state advertising.

An EU official, speaking with Study Hall on condition of anonymity, explains what the Commission hoped to achieve by introducing the Act. “We have seen the situation getting worse and worse for years,” the official says, pointing to Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia as examples of countries where the government has been ramping up pressure on independent media. “We realised that we did not have tools at the EU level to address that.”

The Act would indeed mark a significant increase in the Commission’s powers. At present, the EU has no specific legal basis to punish a member state that openly attacks press freedom. If the law is passed, and a member state did not respect its provisions, the Commission would be able to begin infringement proceedings that may result in sanctions. The main objective of the Act, the official says, “is to have safeguards at the EU level and to be able to intervene” against political interference in the media. (Hueting cautions that although the Act would apply across the EU, implementing it effectively would still require the cooperation of member states.)

The Act would fit within an existing EU framework, complementing other initiatives designed to promote plurality and transparency in media. The European Democracy Action Plan, announced in 2020, included plans to fund projects that assist journalists, promised to work on curbing anti-press lawsuits, and introduced a Media Ownership Monitor to increase transparency in that sphere. The upcoming Digital Services Act, which intends to strengthen accountability regulations for tech platforms and improve transparency surrounding content moderation, has been mostly welcomed by the European media community, as has the concurrent Digital Markets Act, a landmark tech-focused antitrust law. The Commission has worked closely with civil society, funding pro-press organisations and drawing on their expertise. One of the key systems by which the Commission identifies countries of concern, the Media Pluralism Monitor, was developed with EU support by the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom, based at the European University Institute in Florence. Certain member states, too, have cooperated with civil-society organisations to improve press freedom – Hueting points to the Netherlands’ Persveilig scheme, which compiles reports of threats against journalists and offers support to those affected, as a particularly successful example.

The public consultation’s preoccupation with transparency and diversity in media ownership suggests that the Act will focus on improving accountability for media owners, an essential aspect of the recent deterioration of press freedom in Europe. Media markets in many European countries are in a dire state; newspapers and TV channels have been largely bought up by a small network of ultra-wealthy, politically connected figures. According to openDemocracy, a clutch of government-owned firms in Poland — most notably PKN Orlen, the state oil refinery — has bought large sections of the media industry and sacked critical journalists. In Bulgaria, which has fewer journalists per capita than anywhere else in the EU, the oligarch and ex-politician Delyan Peevski allegedly controls 80% of print-media distribution. (Peevski, accused of providing favourable coverage to politicians in exchange for protection from criminal investigation, has also been sanctioned under America’s Magnitsky regime.) Andrej Babiš, a billionaire who owns vast swathes of the Czech Republic’s media, served as that country’s prime minister from 2017 to 2021, and has been accused of politicising the coverage of his outlets. The problem is not restricted to central and eastern Europe: during his various stints as Italy’s prime minister between 1994 and 2011, the media mogul Silvio Berlusconi was estimated to have direct or indirect sway over 90% of broadcasting.

Poland, which has dropped 46 places on the Press Freedom Index since 2015, has been particularly aggressive in its attacks on the press. State-linked groups have repeatedly sued independent media houses, in a textbook example of the effectiveness of SLAPPs. Last year, the ruling Law and Justice party, a right-wing populist outfit, sought to pass a law preventing companies based outside the EU from holding controlling stakes in Polish media firms. The bill was ostensibly intended to prevent infiltration by hostile foreign powers, but its true objective, said critics, was to force the American media house Discovery to divest from TVN, a popular Polish channel that has often criticised the government. Although wide condemnation and protests eventually prompted the country’s president to veto the law, that it was attempted at all highlights the degree to which Poland’s government is willing to engage in open conflict with independent media.

Hungary’s case is perhaps the most egregious example of the deterioration of press freedom in the EU, part of a wider erosion of the country’s institutions by Viktor Orbán, a self-described proponent of “illiberal democracy” who has served as prime minister since 2010. A report by the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) found “a coordinated system of censorship and content control not seen since the fall of the Communist regime” and “a degree of media control unprecedented in an EU member state”, while RSF named Orbán a “press freedom predator”, alongside such figures as Mohammed bin Salman and Xi Jinping.

In an interview with Study Hall, András Arató, the president and owner of Klubrádió, Hungary’s last independent public-affairs radio station, identifies two main paths by which Orbán’s Fidesz party has seized control of much of the Hungarian media landscape. The first, he says, is through disparities in state advertising, a particular area of concern for the EU. The EFJ report notes that more than two-thirds of state broadcasting ads are directed toward a single channel, the pro-government TV2, while the independent channel RTL Klub, which enjoys a similar viewership to TV2, receives just 1%.

Because state advertising is a key revenue source for modestly-funded independent outlets, Arató says, many of them, driven by fear or a desperation for income, soon fall into the government line, laying the groundwork for the ruling party’s second main strategy in its conquest of Hungarian media: the large-scale purchase of independent outlets by wealthy party associates, after which the outlets are often purged of dissenting voices. KESMA, a foundation set up in 2018 and controlled by Fidesz figures, owns nearly 500 outfits, almost all of which parrot government narratives. A study by Agnes Urban, an economist at Corvinus University in Budapest, found that government-linked backers finance nearly 80% of politics-focused media.

Independent media outlets that are not successfully bought out are targeted in other ways. The government revoked Klubrádió’s broadcasting license last year, allegedly for the station’s failure to meet regulatory requirements. This decision was taken by the Media Council, which, although nominally independent, is appointed by Fidesz.

Arató tells me the Council’s reasoning was “a lie, word by word,” and says that none of the justifications it provided had any legal basis. Mihály Hardy, Klubrádió’s editor-in-chief, adds that the station’s management has pursued legal options, including appealing to Hungary’s highest court, but this has not worked. “Sometimes the court has even refused to examine the matter, and has accepted the reasoning of the Media Council without considering the argumentation of Klubrádió.” The station has responded by shifting its operations online. The revocation of its license has actually boosted both its audience and donations, Arató notes, reflecting the fierce loyalty of its listeners: in the 12 years since Orbán’s election, he says, Klubrádió has received nearly €6 million in contributions.

The EU official draws on Klubrádió’s case as exemplifying the need for a specific media-protection law. “We realised that the decision of the Hungarian media regulator did not respect EU telecoms rules.” But while this did prompt the Commission to launch an infringement procedure against Hungary, the official says, there are no rules directly targeted at press-freedom violators, making it difficult for the Commission to take action in every case.

The state’s erosion of independent media in Hungary is not a recent development, Hueting says. “It’s been a decade of more and more government control over media being established.” The EU has not done enough even with the tools it already had, he argues, and while the Act might indicate a more proactive attitude toward media and intends to strengthen the Commission’s ability to fight threats to press freedom, for any real impact to be felt, “that pattern would have to change.”

Arató is not optimistic that the EU’s efforts to boost press freedom in Hungary will have any significant immediate impact. “The elections are very close and the overwhelming majority of communication is absolutely controlled by Fidesz,” he says. Although Klubrádió has sought relief through the EU’s court system and argued its case at the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights, Hardy explains, the long backlog at both tribunals provides little hope of redress in the next several years. Meanwhile, he says, Hungary’s government is making life ever more difficult for Klubrádió, offering its former radio frequency in an auction that “almost surely” will be won by Spirit FM, a pro-government station.

Time is not on Klubrádió’s side, and the formal process of drafting the Act, writing it into law, and enforcing it will no doubt be a lengthy process. The EU official I spoke with acknowledges that it will be some time before the Act is adopted, but argues that the fact that the process is ongoing is indicative of the EU’s new, intensified focus on media freedom. Ten years ago, the official says, media freedom was generally dismissed at the Commission as being the responsibility of the member states alone. But having seen the irregularity with which media freedom was respected in several EU countries, “we really realise that we have to be more creative and stronger than that.”

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