speech by Renate Schroeder, Director, European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), delivered at the kick-off-meeting of MeDeMAP, March 8-10, 2023, Vienna
I can be short: the journalists’ perspective is precarious, dangerous with unprecedented challenges, but – and one could almost say against all odds – very alive.
In the following, I will share with you challenges for journalism when it comes to the safety of journalists, their working conditions, increased precarity and mounting self-censorship. And what the EFJ, together with other press freedom and increasingly civil society organizations, is doing to raise awareness of what indeed is at stake: the people’s right to know, the rule of law and democracy.
A few days ago the EFJ, together with 14 partner organizations of the Council of Europe’s Platform to Promote the Protection of Journalism and Safety of Journalists, published their 2023 annual report under the title “War in Europe and the fight for the right to report”. The report reveals a continued degradation of press freedom across the continent. Throughout 2022, the Platform documented 289 alerts concerning 37 countries, with journalists being murdered, imprisoned, physically attacked, legally harassed, and subjected to smear campaigns.
Safety of journalists
The Council of Europe (CoE) launched this Platform in 2015 as a unique mechanism which helps the dialogue between the governments and the organizations of journalists. Contributing partner organizations, including the EFJ and IFJ, issue alerts on media freedom violations and publish annual reports on the situation of media freedom and the safety of journalists in Europe. For researchers, it is also an excellent database.
This year’s annual report has cast doubt on Member States’ commitment to upholding obligations on freedom of expression, the protection of journalism, and the safety of journalists under the Council of Europe’s statute and the European Convention on Human Rights.
2022 was undoubtedly a year marked by war in Europe but also a range of new and established methods of silencing independent journalism, including surveillance and spyware, legal harassment, arrests and detention, media capture, restrictive legislation, and continued cases of impunity. 127 journalists today are behind bars. The contents of the report illustrate a clear and urgent need for the Council of Europe, Member States, and other European institutions to address the threats facing journalism in Europe with swift and coordinated action.
The EFJ is monitoring with its partner organizations serious violations of media freedom in EU member and applicant countries through another mechanism, the so-called Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR), a tool financed by the European Commission. According to their latest report, the MFRR documented 415 media freedom violations in the EU Member States throughout 2022. Verbal attacks, including harassment and threats were the most common types of violations, followed by legal incidents and physical assaults.
As part of such monitoring exercise, the EFJ is doing is also participating in media freedom missions to EU member states and applicant countries where something is at stake. Recent missions took place in Slovenia, Italy, Greece, The Netherlands, Spain, and Malta, and the latest was a few weeks ago in Slovakia. They are all eye-openers about how serious the situation is.
In Slovakia, as you may remember, five years ago, the Slovak investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová were brutally murdered. The EFJ joined this mission to Bratislava to commemorate on their murder. Meetings with representatives of journalists, the authorities and the opposition concluded that sweeping social and political changes took place in Slovakia after the murder, but the mastermind of the murder has still not been convicted, and the authorities have yet to take all necessary measures to protect journalists and defend independent media. The Ján Kuciak Research Centre (ICJK) presented the results of a research that shows that more than two-thirds of Slovak journalists have experienced an attack or threat in the past year. In this survey, it is stated that there are more and more such attacks, mainly verbal, both in person and on the Internet. The Centre has launched the Safe Journalism project, which aims to monitor and prevent attacks on journalists and help victims.
Among the greatest threats journalists in Slovakia are facing today are verbal attacks, including denigrating smear campaigns from politicians, which acts as a signpost for members of the public to further carry out online abuse. These attacks from politicians – which should be unequivocally condemned – remain largely unsanctioned.
This example does not stand alone and shows the urgency of political will and support of civil society to help journalists guarantee an enabling environment to do their work without fear.
The need to address the safety of journalists across the EU has been highlighted further not only by recent cases currently under investigation, such as the murders of Greek journalist Giorgios Karaivaz and Dutch journalist Peter R. de Vries in 2021 but also by some examples from a recent conference we organized on the safety4journalists, another project financially supported by the European Commission.
In Sweden, 30% of our affiliates’ members reported receiving threats online, with 4 out of 10 refraining from reporting on topics due to the threats. The union gathered this data to show employers and politicians and move them to take action. We talk about harassment as a workplace problem, which it is, but it is also a problem for democracy.
In Finland, journalists who have been threatened have mostly been writing about immigration (42%), politics and elections (27%), and ethnic and linguistic communities (26%).
According to a survey conducted in 2022 by UNESCO and the International Centre for Journalists (ICFJ), 73% of respondents had experienced some form of online violence during their work, with threats of physical violence or even death in 25% of cases; only 55% reported such attacks online and a quarter of them did not receive any support from their employers or media. The survey identifies online violence as one of the most worrying threats to the safety and work of women journalists, as well as to freedom of information, with 32% having received threats or insults on social networks and 16% having suffered cyber-bullying.
In 2021, the European Commission adopted a Recommendation on the protection, safety and empowerment of journalists. If EU member states had the political will and would implement this excellent recommendation with a holistic approach that also includes journalists’ and in particular freelancers’ working conditions, we may have improved the overall situation a bit at least. Our members and other actors are pushing to get many of the excellent recommendations implemented at the national level, but very little success has been recorded: In Greece, pressure also from the European Commission has worked, and the union was able, with public support, to set up the first European Training Centre for the Safety of Journalists and Media Professionals; and Germany and the Netherlands are more transparent in monitoring and cooperation with the police.
Working conditions
In a paper entitled Journalism: A profession under pressure? Researchers from University of London and University of Södertörn explain that journalism as a profession is becoming less professional because there is less time for creativity, tasks are becoming increasingly technical, sources are not cross-checked and data are less verified. Cut and paste journalism, clickbait journalism and deteriorating working conditions have caused an unprecedented brain drain in journalism all this adding up to a damaging lack of trust in media.
The economic crisis of the printed press has accelerated in particular in smaller EU member states, like Slovenia, Croatia but also in Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain to name a few, to a point that big redundancy packages, cutting of editorial teams leading to terrible work intensification in editorial teams working ever more for the digital platforms or online editions.
In Spain, according to a survey carried out by one of our affiliates, the Federation of Journalists’ Unions in Spain (FeSP), at the end of 2022, 52.3% of the professionals surveyed (72% women) stated that their work and professional situation has worsened after the pandemic, mainly due to a heavier workload for the same income, mental health problems or difficulty in reconciling work and private life. In other countries, it looks almost alike.
Young journalists usually start as freelance journalists earning less than people working in fast food restaurants, for example. With six euros an hour, how can you fulfil the watchdog function? One symptom of the crisis in the profession is the explosion of the number of burnout cases, also because they cannot fulfil the tasks for which they started to be journalists. 15 years ago, a journalist was writing one article a day, while today they have to work three or four. The newsroom atmosphere also changed with fewer reporters going on the streets and more orders from above, including commercial imperatives. In some cases, journalists are given orders which are out of line with reality, and as a consequence, readership or listeners may get lost. This is a dangerous phenomenon and is one of the reasons for societal anger against the media. In short, what we are seeing is a shift from the world of journalism to the world of communication.
The positive shift is that journalists become their own publishers, create new digital start-ups, and work on constructive, engaging journalism, audio, local etc.. We need more diverse newsrooms, and we need journalists who can listen and explain the increasingly complex world around us. This still happens in niche form, in some public service media throughout Europe, but it becomes a resource for the elite.
The public right to know is seriously endangered, in particular at a local level. The often recited and growing “news deserts” have indeed a serious impact on democratic procedures, including elections and the rule of law.
Self-censorship
Recent studies have shown that self-censorship among journalists is on the rise. According to a recent CoE report called ‘Journalist under pressure. Unwarranted interference, fear and self-censorship in Europe’, journalists “are routinely expected to breach the ethical codes of journalism by distorting their reports to meet the improper or corrupt demands of their editors or managers”. A wide range of unwarranted interference was reported over the three years period of the study (2017), with 40% of respondents claiming that the interference was bad enough to affect their personal lives. Significant percentages reported toning down sensitive, critical stories, reporting content in a less controversial manner, withholding information and shaping stories to suit companies’ editorial interests.
However, it is important to note that 36% reported that the experience of unwarranted interference made them even more committed to not engage in self-censorship. Given the difficult economic situation journalists have too often accepted to frame their products to ensure commercial sustainability.
Conclusions
I gave you only a small outlook on challenges journalists face today, of course at very different levels depending on the country they live in, whether they are male or female etc.. The situation of press and media freedom in Europe, at least in parts of it, especially in times of Covid and the war in Ukraine, is becoming increasingly heated. It is burning in many places in Europe and where it is not burning (yet) stakeholders and politicians are complacent. Monitoring tools like MFRR are important to draw public attention to these issues and provide support for journalists in need. This attention is the first step to real change and improvement, as reaching the right people in civil society in politics and forcing them to concern themselves with issues of media freedom is a key conduit for making the issue more visible for the general public as well. We will need to see how decision-makers will react to the increasing pressure on the issue in the future. When independent journalism is squeezed to small niches, when commercial and political influence is growing within an ever more fragile media ecosystem having lost a big part of its revenues to the digital platforms, when self-censorship is on the rise and when disinformation is spreading, it is high time for a strong Media Freedom Act (EMFA) within the EU.
In fact, the European Commission adopted last September a draft proposal for a EMFA, realizing that attacks on media freedom have an impact on the rule of law, democracy and European integration. There is a lot of opposition by the co-legislators who are afraid of dealing with media and press, something in the past dealt with exclusively at the national level. But the media ecosystem has completely changed, and with converging media, even the so important principle of self-regulation has to be put in another framework.
While EFJ welcomes this urgent act as an important political sign and, together with many other press freedom and civil society NGOs, emphasises the need to strengthen it to be in line with CoE standards so as to have tools that indeed protect journalists from undue interference, promote greater transparency of media ownership and of the allocation of state advertising, and support public service media. I strongly appeal to all of you in the name of EFJ and many other NGOS in the field of democracy, human rights transparency and digital rights to work on a strengthened EMFA. It is now we need this. We need academic support to get government support for this historic landmark act, which for the first time acknowledges that journalism is a public good; indeed, the motto of the EFJ for the last 15 years almost.