'Fake news' is now at the full centre of attention. While the European Commission plans to present an action plan on misinformation on 5 December, the Council of Europe published a report, on Tuesday 9 October, on European law on the accuracy and fairness of news and current affairs reports broadcast by media organisations.
Entitled ‘Media reporting: facts, nothing but facts’, this 170-page document prepared by the European Audiovisual Observatory underlines that the EU has practically no binding legal texts on this subject.
As a result, it notes that "it is the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and its neighbour, the European Court of Human Rights, that is paving the way for good practices in the processing of information and news by broadcast, print and online media".
The Court, the report recalls, held that under Article 10 of the ECHR, which guarantees the right to freedom of expression, member states have a positive obligation to "guarantee (...) public access, through television and radio, to impartial and accurate information and to a plurality of opinions and comments". Since 1970, the committee of ministers and the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe have issued more than 80 recommendations and resolutions on the media.
The report concludes with an overview of the situation in 11 member states, namely: Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, the Russian Federation, Slovakia, Spain and the United Kingdom.
Further information can be found at: https://bit.ly/2IOtInS (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)