Editor’s note: The Fix is introducing a series of articles on the rapidly changing regulations of the media. We discuss recent legislative pieces drafted and adopted at the EU level, as well as in national law, to provide insights on how they affect news publishers in the coming years. The main trends of the last couple of years included more obligations imposed on platforms, efforts to curb AI, ensure prominence of public service media, and facilitate pluralism. 

This article addresses the recent EU legislation trying to shield independent journalism.

The Economist’s last democracy index looks concerning, as do other figures on the level of media pluralism, internet and press freedom introduced by projects like WPFI, MPM or Freedom House.  

Given the strong bond between political and media systems, there’s no surprise. While authoritarian countries like Russia or Iran are reaching the bottom in such lists and deepening their mutual alliances, in liberal countries legislators are between a rock and a hard place in tackling the pernicious influence of foreign propaganda and dealing with the influx of populism at home. Hence tougher and somewhat controversial policies in democracies like the UK, US or EU states, which too lower their scores

There’s also a wide space in between with EU aspiring candidates struggling to alleviate press-party parallelism and accommodating fierce battles between civil society actors and government bodies. Georgian newsrooms’ predicament on the backdrop of the recently adopted “foreign agents” law is a perfect example. Another worthy case is Ukraine’s 2022 law on media that tried to reconcile martial law with the EU media policies and faced backlash for granting too much power to the media regulator. 

Such national law cases perfectly illustrate contradictions in which the EU itself was caught while elaborating the EU Media Freedom Act aiming to set equal rules for all.

Let’s take a closer look at how it affects news publishers. 

National security versus free speech

In April 2024, the EU Media Freedom Act was voted in the EU Parliament and its final text is now available through the Official Journal. The new legislative piece emerged in 2021 as a response to the growing trend of newsrooms’ politicisation evident, for instance, from the Media Pluralism Monitor (MPM) findings. 

While the EU space is perceived as rather unified, the legislative gap between countries can be huge. Even a quick inquiry into more data on states like Croatia, Malta or Greece shows how little is available about their media companies’ ownership structures in comparison to, say, Norway or Sweden, and how differently they draw the boundaries of government intervention in the media sector.

In 2019, the MPM raised concerns over the nature of Hungarian media coverage simultaneously featuring Orban and tailored to the 2019 EU Parliament elections. Issues like that made clear the necessity to scrutinise and harmonise media laws across all EU members.

One of the Act’s crucial provisions touches upon the ability of government representatives to use spyware on journalists and requires them to disclose sources. As is evident from many legal disputes, it is the notion of national interest that would be conjured up first to justify attacks on the free press. 

In its final text, the Act requires members to develop provisions banning the use of spyware but still contains vaguely defined exemptions for “national security“ and “severe crimes“ that can be used creatively to crack down on media.

Both NGOs, research initiatives and the EU Parliament in this case advocated for clearer boundaries to guard independent journalists and their findings, while EU governments were the ones that pushed to preserve exemptions, sometimes rightfully concerned with the need to shield foreign propaganda. 

Various stakeholders like the International Press Institute have already called on nations to go beyond the minimum set by the Act.

In the meantime, in countries like Malta, Poland, Greece or Hungary, law provisions prohibiting spying on journalists will appear for the first time in history.

Quandaries for platforms 

The Act also pledged to guard independent publications from unjustified takedowns on social media. Specifically, it offers a procedure for an outlet to claim itself as such and asks the so-called VLOPs (very large online platforms, a term derived from the recent EU Digital Services Act) like Facebook and X to distinguish between independent and non-independent, meaning government-funded sources. When it comes to the first category, a channel will have 24 hours to first dispute the offered removal, and it’s only after the answer or in the case of its absence a platform takes down a publication’s posts. 

Ironically, this provision somewhat clashes with the ideas lying behind the DSA (discussed earlier alongside complimenting legislation in other countries): to make VLOPs more responsible for the information shared, treating them more like first tier powerful publishers rather than neutral hosts. The EU DSA implied heavy fines in severe cases when a platform fails to ensure illegal content was spotted. In practice, the DSA prompts platforms to resort to more stringent content filters, more takedowns “just in case“ and less reliance on news while favouring user-generated stories instead.

Which strategy platforms will pursue in light of new legislative pieces remains unclear.

The newly introduced body, the European Board for Media Services, will also be able to affect disputes and settlements between platforms and independent outlets.

Ownership pluralism and transparency 

Research projects like the one at the LSE illustrate how information imbalance impacts even the very ability to access a country’s media landscape in terms of freedom. It’s quite often that researchers can’t find much about one member state while having an abundance of data on another. 

The Act makes clear the need for every EU member to facilitate pluralism through transparency. It requires countries to create databases disclosing companies’ ownership and the amount of state advertising they were commissioned. The reasoning behind that is that in the triad of pluralism usually considered (selection, presentation and ownership), the last is said to have a decisive impact. 

The Act does not, however, set specific rules on standardised disclosure. Neither does it clarify the terms of unhindered wide public access to such data. Because of that, the EU Media Freedom Act has already been criticised for the absence of an EU-level comprehensive database that could spot, for instance, cross-border ownership structures and income flows.

The case of Hungarian media shows that while the market share of a particular company can seem insignificant in terms of its monopoly power, separately registered media entities with different owners may still lead to the same final beneficiaries behind the curtain. 

Establishing these ties is likely to remain a challenge for the EU and even more so for non-EU partly free democracies in coming years. 

In the meantime, member countries have time up to 2025 to adopt mandatory rules in their own systems.

Source of the cover photo: Thijs ter Haar via Flickr, under CC BY 2.0,


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