The European Newspaper Publishers’ Association (ENPA) and the European Magazine Press Association (EMMA) are concerned about the Commission’s mid-September publication of the Media Freedom Act, which amounts to “a new attempt by the EU to seize legislative competence for the print and digital media”, they warned on 1 September.
“The attempt to impose new regulatory bodies or to extend existing ones to all media, including the press, de facto thwarts the very notion of a media freedom law”, they explain.
While the Commission “justifies this project on the grounds that existing problems in some Member States would hamper the functioning of a single European media market”, the problems “of a very few Member States used as a pretext by the Commission do not represent a pan-European problem”.
“On the contrary, the global comparison shows that many EU Member States are the best in the world in terms of press freedom and diversity (...) and it is precisely those Member States with the least state and regulatory intervention in the press that have topped the press freedom rankings for years”.
The Media Freedom Act will include rules on the management and regulation of public media, as well as greater protection for journalists.
The various annual reports on the Rule of law and the politicisation in some countries of the media landscape, such as Hungary or Poland, or the lack of transparency in media ownership and the independence of regulators, have justified this initiative.
“We don’t want states, as is already the case in some cases, to publicly fund certain media outlets that then write nice articles about them” the European Commission Vice President Věra Jourová recently explained, indicating that “Hungary was the main source of inspiration”.
Link to the position: https://aeur.eu/f/2wb (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)