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Loosening the Partisan Hold over Public Media in Europe [1]
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Date: 2024-08
As the world’s news consumers and voters encounter an increasingly fractured media landscape where misleading and false information run rife, the need for pluralistic and independent public service media could not be more profound. But these outlets are often the first to be targeted by illiberal leaders seeking to increase their sway over public opinion.
In Europe, we have seen governments harm the reputation and independence of public media to the point of limiting their citizens’ access to differing points of view. During Viktor Orbán’s 14-year grip on power, Hungary’s public media has become an official mouthpiece, used to spread false narratives. As a result of this and other moves on Orbán’s part, critical and dissenting opinions have been pushed out of the Hungarian media market, where progovernment discourse dominates. During the right-wing, populist Law and Justice (PiS) party’s eight years in power in Poland, public outlets were stacked with party loyalists and their news programs parroted government talking points, fueling polarization by actively denigrating opposing views. Earlier this year, journalists in Italy and Slovakia went on strike, saying their governments were angling to weaken public broadcasters’ independence through attrition or legislation.
Reversing years of political pressure on weakened or totally co-opted outlets is a tall order. But newly elected governments in Europe are seizing the opportunity to do just that. Recent events in Slovenia and Poland can offer insight on the challenges and opportunities reformers face in their quest to depoliticize public media and rebuild the audience’s trust.
Bumpy roads to reform
Straightforward legislative reforms are time-consuming and prone to obstruction, delaying much-needed relief for newsrooms. In Slovenia, it took over a year to introduce structural safeguards for public media via legislation. Before being voted out of office in 2022, the government of Janez Janša secured effective control of the supervisory board of Radio-television Slovenia (RTV SLO) and put partisan pressure on its journalists. After succeeding Janša that April, Prime Minister Robert Golob proposed a law to depoliticize the management of RTV SLO, ensure a nonpartisan governing board, and limit political interference in its daily operations.
In an effort to thwart the process, Janša’s Slovenian Democratic Party gathered enough signatures to put the matter to a referendum that November. While citizens voted in favor of the law, the Constitutional Court temporarily suspended parts of Golob’s legislation in February 2023, only to lift its hold that May. Throughout this process, RTV SLO continued to struggle with a shortage of staff and uncertain funding.
But rapid-fire, radical approaches are not foolproof, either. Within a week of being sworn in as Poland’s new prime minister in December 2023, Donald Tusk and his coalition government acted swiftly on its campaign pledge to overhaul Poland’s public media outlets. Rather than pursuing legislation—which ran the risk of getting vetoed by President Andrzej Duda, a PiS ally—the government sacked the boards of TVP, Polish Radio, and the Polish Press Agency (PAP) and temporarily took TVP off the air.
After President Duda vetoed funding for public media in response, the Tusk government used a legal loophole to liquidate the three outlets, arguing that the move would enable them to maintain their operations and avoid layoffs amid ongoing reforms. The way these changes were managed raised eyebrows within the legal community, giving further leverage to the PiS-controlled Constitutional Tribunal to condemn the measures and trigger a monthslong legal dispute, though courts recently ruled in favor of the government’s decision to liquidate TVP and the PAP.
Public trust is harder to build back
Despite ongoing reforms, trust in the media can take a much longer time to rebuild. Restoring credibility will require a concerted shift away from the political maneuvers of the past towards investment in high-quality content that can appeal to a wide audience. Since last December, TVP’s news channel shifted away from its previous editorial line and has aimed to provide more informative and diverse coverage. But its ratings have struggled and it has in turn been criticized for favoring Tusk’s government. In its latest survey, released in June 2024, the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report found that only 29 percent of Polish respondents expressed trust in TVP’s coverage—just one percentage point better than in 2023, before the Tusk government’s shake-up.
Public outlets and their staff can also do more than just offer new programming to address the problem; transparency and the facilitation of debate are just as important in the fight to maintain and restore trust. When staff at RTV SLO went on strike in mid-2022, they openly discussed the politically charged pressure they endured in the course of their work. They were equally clear about how the Janša government’s acts affected freedom of expression for ordinary Slovenians, not just journalists. Staff also organized public debates and actively campaigned during the referendum on RTV SLO’s future, which helped lay a foundation of trust and broad-based support for reform.
Strengthening safeguards to future-proof public media
Recent efforts to restore the independence of public media are commendable, but the work is not over. If these outlets are to stand strong as bulwarks against disinformation, reformers should address legal safeguards and funding weaknesses which would leave them ripe for future exploitation if left unresolved.
Where domestic efforts fail to deliver, the European Union (EU) is promising a stronger toolkit. The landmark European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), which took effect in May 2024, mandates that public media agencies’ chiefs and boards must be selected on a nonpartisan basis and should enjoy some level of job security during their terms of service. It also mandates transparent and sustainable financing for public outlets in EU member states.
The EMFA alone will not be enough to completely inoculate European public media from political interference, but its provisions represent a significant roadmap to recovery for these vital organizations—and serve as a warning for governments that are currently breaching these principles to increase their own clout.
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https://freedomhouse.org/article/loosening-partisan-hold-over-public-media-europe
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