As Daphne Caruana Galizia’s family watches her alleged mastermind walk free for now, Malta’s leaders face mounting fury over whether powerful suspects can ever be convicted for killing a journalist.
Malta’s Roberta Metsola, president of the European Parliament, said the fight would go on after the acquittal of millionaire Yorgen Fenech over the 2017 car bombing assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Hungarian state money has spent years financing media acquisitions across Europe. A fund with a long record in that trade has just taken Serbia’s last independent broadcasters. It has done so in an unusual rush, weeks before a Serbian election. Gaps in the public record and undisclosed funding make these, when taken together, difficult to ignore.
Most media reporting on extreme weather doesn’t talk about the root causes or solutions. That contributes to people feeling powerless at a time when they need to mobilise and push their governments into taking action.
The Azerbaijani regime has arrested investigative journalists and dismantled independent media, leaving virtually no one on the ground to report on corruption and trade violations. And yet the EU Commission and German government are placing their trust in the authoritarian petro-state.
A fight over one Kharkiv developer and 143 dirt‑cheap apartments has escalated into a showdown between Ukraine’s embattled anti‑corruption reporters and the law‑enforcement hierarchy tied to President Zelensky’s circle.
The announcement on Friday follows the publication of reports that attempt to decrypt rule-of-law issues in each of the 27 member states. It will include a boost to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.
A victory for publishers over Big Tech (if only it had happened five years ago)In a victory for publishers and a reality check for Silicon Valley, a recent ruling by the European Court of Justice has confirmed that publishers can request Big Tech companies to pay “fair compensation” for using snippets of their news articles.
From Hungary to France, financial strains, political influence, and growing restrictions on press freedom are ever worse in Europe, the general secretary of the European Federation of Journalists, Ricardo Gutiérrez, tells EUobserver in an interview.
Sierra Leone, Senegal, Zambia and Qatar have better press freedoms when compared to both Greece and Cyprus.
Israel has been engaged in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists ever-documented since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a US-based non-profit.
Hungarian journalist Alinda Veiszer reflects on the dismantling of public media, the pressures placed on reporters under Orbán’s system, and the stubborn forms of creative resistance that emerged.
A decade after the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe launched its journalist safety platform, threats have surged: over 2,300 alerts in more than 40 countries, yet fewer than one-in-three receive government responses. Impunity persists, journalists face violence, and democracy pays the price. Responding to alerts, resolving cases and addressing systemic problems should be the rule, not the exception.
Viktor Orbán has also pledged, in his annual address earlier this month, to “clear out” after the April elections media and civil society organisations deemed to threaten “sovereignty.” Fidesz already directly or indirectly control 80 percent of Hungary’s media.
