Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published a report on Monday 21 July outlining the pressure exerted on public media by the authorities in EU Member States, just a few weeks before Article 5 of the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) comes into force on 8 August.
The EMFA imposes obligations on Member States in terms of public service media’s editorial and functional independence.
RSF has drawn up a report on the state of public media in the EU: according to respondents to the study, they are under pressure in more than half of the member countries. These pressures are political, according to 55.17% of respondents, and take the form of interference in governance, sudden appointments to senior management positions and the instrumentalisation of their funding.
Currently used by ten EU Member States, audiovisual licence fees are often threatened with extinction “for populist ends”. When the licence fee is replaced by a budget, the public media budget falls by around 9%, according to RSF.
Reporters Without Borders calls for: civil society participation in media governance; the creation of an independent body to assess public service media’s financial needs, with a multi-year funding plan being established; and investigating a funding system based on a digital platforms tax. Ultimately, according to the NGO, European media regulators will have to adopt common practices for monitoring internal pluralism in the media.
See the report (in French): https://aeur.eu/f/hzx (Original version in French by Florent Servia)