“We must protect Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. If we don’t, we will be giving a gift to autocrats the world over”, declared the European Commissioner for Enlargement, Marta Kos, at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday 1 April.
The freezing of media funds overseen by the government agency USAGM by an executive order issued by US President Donald Trump on Friday 14 March (see EUROPE 13601/18) was invalidated by the Washington court, but has raised concerns across the EU. On 18 March, ten EU Member States proposed EU financial support for Radio Free Europe (see EUROPE 13603/26).
“For 70 years, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty spread hope to those under the fierce grip of state-controlled media and censorship”, Marta Kos emphasised. A Slovenian national, the European Commissioner grew up in Yugoslavia, in the bloc of the Soviet Union. There, she explained, “Radio Free Europe kept our ears and hearts open to another life”.
Many of the speakers at Tuesday’s debate in the House were from Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. MEP Irena Joveva (Renew Europe, Slovenian) said that the EU was “losing the information battle to authoritarian regimes” and that it was “in the interest of the European Union to support these independent media”.
According to Lithuanian MEP Virginijus Sinkevičius (Greens/EFA), the EU should even “guarantee that RFE and other essential media have stable, long-term funding”. Like others, the former European Commissioner raised the issue of protecting “the area of independent journalism, both within and beyond the borders of the EU”.
Latvia’s Nils Ušakovs (S&D), for example, regretted that “the current Latvian government is actively undermining its own public service broadcasting in Russian”. According to the Socialist MEP, the independent media operating in Russian in the EU have the merit of providing information “without any links to the Kremlin”.
António Tânger Corrêa (PfE, Portuguese) more denounced “a coordinated offensive against the free truth”, led by alleged“official fact-checkers”, “authorised narratives” and “security directives”.
The EU would be better off “helping farmers in Slovakia who are fighting foot-and-mouth disease” instead of “paying useless parasites from the so-called independent media”, said Milan Uhrík (ENS, Slovakian), criticising the EU for censoring social networks. (Original version in French by Florent Servia)