It is a paradox that during the COVID-9 pandemic, the importance of trustworthy information increased, but at the same time, the situation for the media rapidly deteriorate. Declining advertising revenues, austerity measures and higher unemployment among journalists have become commonplace.
Recently, the pressure on reporters has increased as COVID deniers have physically attacked journalists at demonstrations in many EU countries and threatened them on social media.
Governments have unilaterally supported media outlets that favorably report on their actions by giving them advertizing time. Initially, there were also restrictions on access to government press conferences, including the revocation of invitations for disagreeable members of the media.
After six years as President of the Association of European Journalists (AEJ), I will be leaving this position next week. And my assessment is ambivalent. Attacks on journalists and restrictions on media freedom have increased in many countries.
On February 14, the Hungarian radio station “Klubrádió”, one of the last independent stations in the country, will stop on-air broadcasting. A court in Budapest ruled that the station, which is critical of the government, had to pay small fines for some ridiculous failures, and withdrew their operating licence. This comes after the internet portal “index.hu”, another critical medium, was silenced last year. Almost 80 percent of the media in Hungary now belongs to the pro-government Kesma consortium.
In Poland, the pressure on media outlets that are critical of the right-nationalist government is growing. A new advertising tax was passed that threatens the existence of private TV stations. The result was that earlier in February, the TV networks that were affected by the tax broadcasted with only a blank screen in protest. At the same time, foreign media owners are to be “persuaded” to sell their newspapers. A regional newspaper group belonging to a German media group was recently sold to the state-owned oil and petrochemical group Orlen.
Last year, AEJ lodged a protest with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) about the one-sided coverage of the presidential elections by Polish state radio and TV. This umbrella organization has committed itself to safeguarding the independent reporting of its members.
It is hard to believe that there was not a single TV debate between the right-wing nationalist incumbent Andrzej Duda and his liberal rival Rafal Trzaskowski before the presidential elections in Poland in May 2020. An analysis of airtime by our Polish members showed that while state television reported positively on the incumbent in 60 segments, it only reported on the challenger in 30, all of which were negative.
In neighboring Belarus, more than 400 journalists reporting on the demonstrations against the electoral fraud of long-term president Alexander Lukashenko have already been detained. As recently as last February 9, two young female reporters from the Polish-based TV station Belset have been put on trial for their coverage of the pro-democracy protests.
In Russia, many journalists were also arrested after the arrest of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. My longtime general secretary, Slovak TV-journalist Tibor Macak, used his contact with the man who saved Navalny’s last summer, Jaka Bizilj, the founder of the Cinema for Peace-initiative. Bizilj organized the flight to Berlin after Navalny was poisoned in Siberia with a chemical agent. Bizilj wrote a comment for AEJ asking for tough EU sanctions against Russia and a stop to the construction of the Nord Stream II gas pipeline.
In other EU countries – not only in Hungary and Poland – media freedom is often being put into question. In France, video recordings of security officers during police operations have been banned. An interior minister found nothing wrong with rummaging through journalists’ laptops in Germany. In Austria, tabloids received the bulk of the national COVID-subsidies, but quality-papers got smaller amounts.
One of the most impressive experiences I had as AEJ’s leader was my participation in a fact-finding mission to Turkey by several international media organizations in 2017. We visited the last independent editorial offices, including the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet, where several colleagues had ended up in prison, most of them on trumped-up charges of supporting a terrorist organisation. Where usually popular columns could be read, only an empty column with the photo of the respective prisoner appeared. Our Turkish colleagues asked us to report on the sad media situation in Turkey once we returned back home.
AEJ’s Media Freedom Representative, William Horsley, helped set up the “Platform for Persecuted Journalists” at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. We often reported on cases of attacks or harassment against journalists there. Later, the governments of the respective members of the EU had to take a stand. Unfortunately, this act of naming and shaming often proved ineffective. I have therefore redirected the focus to the EU institutions. They have become increasingly important for the defense of media freedom in Europe through new targeted European regulations.
The worst incidents that have occurred during my tenure are the murders of two investigative reporters – Daphne Galicia Caruana, who was killed by a car bomb in Malta in 2017; and Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak, who was shot dead in cold blood in his home, together with his fiancée, in 2018. In each case, those behind the killings, in both politics and business, have still not been brought to justice.
At the last AEJ congress in Paris, before the pandemic in December 2019, Caruana Galizia’s son Matthew emotionally reported on his mother’s lack of public support just before her tragic death. She had 46 defamation lawsuits pending, so-called SLAPP lawsuits (Strategic lawsuits against public participation).
In a Zoom interview with AEJ members, EU Commission Vice-President Vera Jourova, responsible for European fundamental values and transparency, announced an EU directive against such SLAPP proceedings for this year. At the same time, Jourova also wants to fight foreign influence on European election campaigns, especially from troll factories in Russia and China.
The so-called “microtargeting” of certain groups of voters by social media – as carried out by Cambridge Analytica without any consequences in the UK and the US – is also to be prohibited. Social media must respect a code of conduct and delete calls for violence and terrorism within a few hours. The EU Commission plan is to finance courses to train journalists and schoolchildren to take more effective actions against fake news and disinformation.
The fact that the EU Commission is now more serious about defending media freedom and a plurality of opinion is a signal that gives hope at the end of my term.
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