Month: July 2021

Romanian Intelligence: Hospitals Need ‘Urgent’ Protection from Cyber-Attacks

Posted on by Ivana Jeremic

Days after authorities announced that the Witting public hospital in Bucharest had been targeted by hackers, the Romanian Information Service, SRI, has called on the government to take “urgent” action to protect state-owned medical institutions from these disruptive threats.

Romania’s national intelligence service has warned of widespread deficiencies when it comes to cybersecurity in hospitals, in spite of their increasing reliance on informatics and online systems to run their daily operations.

“Such attacks against some hospitals in Romania represent a sign of alarm about the low level of cybersecurity that exists,” the agency’s statement issued on Friday said, stressing “the need to adopt centralized decisions” that make it mandatory for all medical institutions to impose “minimal cybersecurity measures”.

The intelligence service has briefed the ministries of Health and Transport and Infrastructure concerning the “way in which the attack [reported this month against the Witting hospital] was conducted”, warning the two ministries about the “vulnerabilities of which attackers took advantage”, the SRI statement on Friday said. 

The secret service also presented both departments with a “series of measures to be implemented on urgent basis, in order to limit the effects generated of the attack as well as to prevent future ransomware attacks.

“Although they are of a medium or reduced complexity, this kind of ransomware attacks can generate major dysfunctions in the activities carried out by medical field’s institutions,” the SRI statement explained.

In the absence of clear general standards, the level of cybersecurity in public hospitals and most Romanian state institutions largely depends on the competence and awareness of the personnel in charge, specialists told BIRN.

On 22 July this year, the SRI said the servers of the Witting hospital in Bucharest were targeted by a cyberattack conducted with a ransomware application known as PHOBOS.

“After encrypting the data, the attackers demanded that a ransom be paid for them to decrypt them again,” the intelligence service said at the time.

The attack did not affect the functioning of the hospital, which assured the continuity of operations using data from offline registries. According to the SRI, no ransom was paid to the hackers.

The intelligence service said the attack resembles others that targeted four Romanian hospitals in the summer of 2019. The systems of the four hospitals were not protected by antivirus and were also compromised using PHOBOS.

North Macedonia to Toughen Penalties for Attacks on Journalists

Posted on by Ivana Jeremic

Newly envisaged penalties for assaulting a journalist or a media worker adopted by North Macedonia’s government on Tuesday will be from three months to three years in jail, the same as for assaulting a police officer, the Justice Ministry said.

“After adoption by the government, we will immediately process these changes to parliament. I expect parliament to pass these changes right after the summer break”, meaning early autumn, Justice Minister Bojan Maricic said.

The minister said the changes mean in practice that authorities will treat cases where journalists are prevented from doing their job or are attacked the same way as they treat assaults on police officers. Accordingly, the prosecution will process these cases ex officio.

Another change the minister announced is the planned reduction of defamation fines for journalists, editors and media outlets through amendments to the Law on Civil Responsibility.

“The defamation fines for journalists and editors will be five times lower, and for media outlets they will be three times lower [than before],” Maricic wrote.

If these changes pass, a journalist who loses a civil court case for defamation will pay a maximum fine of 400 euros instead of the current maximum of 2,000 euros, which is in many cases equal to or more than four average monthly salaries for a journalist.

For editors, the maximum fine will decrease from 10,000 euros to 2,000, and for the media outlets, the sum should fall from the current maximum of 15,000 to 5,000 euros.

The third announced change that affects journalists is the planned introduction of the criminal offence of stalking. This will envisage fines or jail sentences for stalkers who not only physically endanger or threaten their victims but also do that online.

The maximum sentence for this offence will be three years in jail.

A new study, “Media Pluralism Monitor 2021”, published by the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom at the European University Institute earlier this month, states that some things have improved for the media in North Macedonia compared to 2016, the last year in power of the former authoritarian PM Nikola Gruevski, who was ousted in 2017.

The report notes that media freedoms in North Macedonia during 2020 were broader, and that journalists and their associations are no longer exposed to serious physical attacks and pressures.

The ministry said the changes are being made not only to increase the security of the journalists but also to prevent online stalking and abuse of private data. The recent so-called Telegram scandal revealed the recurring existence of a Telegram group sharing explicit pictures and videos of women and girls.

Albanian Police Filmed Mistreating TV News Journalists

Posted on by Ivana Jeremic

Albanian police on Tuesday manhandled Ergjys Gjencaj, a journalist for the News 24 TV channel, and pushed his colleague Klodiana Lala after failing to detain a suspected criminal.

The incident was caught on camera, and afterwards Interior Minister Bledi Cuci told BIRN that he will order an investigation, while the Office of Tirana Circuit Prosecution said it will check the police’s conduct.

Several videos taken at the scene show several plainclothes police officers stopping the car of their suspect, who then refuses to unlock the doors.

A News 24 car with the TV channel’s logos on all sides then arrives at the scene and journalists Gjencaj and Lala get out.

Gjencaj starts filming using his mobile phone as the suspect runs away. After failing to arrest the suspect, several officers turn on the journalists.

One of them is seen grabbing the phone of Gjencaj, who is made to lie face down on the ground. As Lala starts protesting, a person in civilian clothes who is believed to be a police officer pushes her away.

Gjencaj told BIRN that police kept him face down for several minutes and checked his pockets.

“I have worked as journalist covering the police for the last 20 years. This is the first time that such thing happened to me,” Gjencaj told BIRN.

Lala, a known crime reporter, said that they both just happened to be on the scene when the attempted arrest took place.

“I cried out that they were stopping a journalist,” Lala said, emphasising that the officers could not have missed the logos of the news channel on their car.

In a statement, the prosecution promised “in-depth verifications of the incident”.


Journalist Ergys Gjencaj lying on the ground during the incident. Photo: Balkanweb.com

State Police director Ardi Veliu didn’t respond to BIRN’s request for a comment by the time of publication.

The Albania Media Council alleged that what happened “can hardly be an isolated incident”

“Unable to respond to crime, they orient the violence towards the reporters,” it said.

The Union of Albanian Journalists, a rights group based in Tirana, said it was “a grave incident” and called for the perpetrators to be punished.

“We condemn this act of violence and police brutality committed against a reporter,” the Union wrote on its Facebook page.

There had been several cases of police violence against reporters in the last several years while concerns had been raised due to lack of punishment for officers involved.

In 2019, police in Dibra mistreated Enver Doci, a News 24 reporter who happened to be at the scene of an operation.

Police acknowledged the incident and apologised following a local and international outcry but the officers responsible faced no consequences.

Police faced further criticism last December when two journalists, Xhoi Malesia and Qamil Chani were violently stopped in two separate incidents while reporting during clashes between police and young protesters.

Calls by Albanian rights groups to Prime Minister Edi Rama and State Police director Veliu to condemn the violence against media workers received no response.

Germany Probes Alleged ‘Execution List’ of Turkish Journalists

Posted on by Ivana Jeremic

Deutsche Welle Turkish reported on Tuesday that the German Federal Interior Ministry said that it will continue to examine the possible existence of an alleged ‘execution list’ targeting Turkish journalists who have been critical of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government.

“The investigation will be deepened,” Helmut Teichmann, undersecretary at German Federal Interior Ministry, said in response to a German MP’s questions in the Bundestag, according to Deutsche Welle Turkish.

There have been increasing numbers of attacks by unknown assailants on Turkish independent journalists in recent months in Germany and other European countries.

Most recently, Turkish dissident journalist Erk Acarer was attacked in front of his house in Berlin and hospitalised on July 7.

Acarer said on Twitter that he knew the attackers and that they told him to cease his journalistic activities.

German police also warned Celal Baslangic, the editor-in-chief of Arti Tv and Arti Gercek, an independent media outlet headquartered in Cologne, that he is at risk of assassination.

Baslangic said that two police officers visited him at his house and confirmed the existence of an “assassination list” of journalistic critics of Turkish strongman Erdogan.

The German Federation of Journalists, DJV also said that according to its sources inside the German police, there is an execution list targeting 55 Turkish journalists.

“There are a series of threats and attacks against exiled journalists from Turkey living in Germany,” DJV chair Frank Uberall said in a written statement on Saturday.

He urged German Foreign Minister to summon Turkey’s envoy in Berlin and “make it unmistakably clear to the ambassador that these were unacceptable crimes”.

There has been no official response to the allegations from Turkey so far.

Germany has become home to many critical Turkish journalists since Erdogan intensified his crackdown on his opponents in the wake of a failed coup attempt in 2016.

Several Turkish media outlets also moved to Germany to continue their operations and avoid pressure.

Since the failed coup attempt in 2016, the Turkish government has closed or seized 204 media institutions.

According to watchdog organisation Reporters Without Borders, more than 200 journalists and media workers have been imprisoned in Turkey in the past five years.

Turkey continues to be one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists and listed as ‘not free’ by US-based watchdog Freedom House.

Sacked Index Journalists Make History in Hungary

Posted on by ivana.nikolic

Veronika Munk sits in front of her computer in a somewhat rundown apartment-office in Budapest. She frowns as she reads the text in front of her, but in general she looks satisfied. Munk and her colleagues at Telex have achieved what few people in Hungary thought possible: they managed to build a completely new media outlet from scratch in 10 months mostly financed by readers, defying the hostile media environment that exists in Hungary.

On July 24 last year, Munk and her colleagues made international headlines when they staged a dramatic collective walk-out from Hungary’s then-leading independent news site Index. “All of a sudden, instead of writing the news, we had become the news,” she tells BIRN.

About 90 of the Index journalists resigned en masse following the sacking of editor-in-chief Szabolcs Dull. In the lead-up to his dismissal, Dull had been warning that the independence of the editorial team was in danger and he moved the “freedom barometer” on the homepage of Index to “in danger”.

The journalist resignations made the news around the world and thousands of people took to the streets of Budapest to demand a free press and a ‘new Index’.

“It was a critical situation, and I tried to keep a cool head,” says Munk, who was Index’s deputy editor-in-chief and now leads Telex as co-editor. “I felt responsible for the team and all I knew was that we wanted to stay together. But on the other hand, I remember I felt an immense sadness and weariness – I didn’t even go to the demos because I was so tired.”

Munk has been a journalist all her adult life. She was at Index for 18 years, working her way up from intern to deputy editor-in-chief, and witnessed how the ruling Fidesz party has gradually assumed control over the bastions of Hungary’s independent press since it came to power in 2010.

Using a mix of restrictive media laws and deep-pocketed friendly oligarchs, the party has seized control of major television and radio stations, news portals, and print media publishers, to the point where independent analysis this year showed that Orban allies exert control over a majority of the country’s 88 most influential media outlets.

Index had fended off repeated attempts by government-allied oligarchs to influence its content. But after the municipal elections in 2019, when the Hungarian opposition scored some unexpected victories, most notably in Budapest, the Fidesz leadership reportedly decided to increase the pressure on Index, to mute critical voices ahead of the 2022 general election.

Index’s Achilles’ heel was its dependence on its sales house – responsible for advertisements and revenues – which was acquired in 2018 by businessmen close to the government, who started to apply pressure on the editorial department.

A year ago, Munk told BIRN that, “it was not the classical censorship on the content that we encountered, but a constant pressure on changing our editorial structure.”

The collective resignation was a desperate cry for help; and the project to set up a new outlet was a race against time. “It was clear from the very beginning that we had to react fast. The pressure was strong both inside, from the colleagues, and outside, from society,” Szabolcs Dull, the other co-editor of Telex, tells BIRN.

Dull remembers that the gestures of solidarity from society at large were heart-warming. “In shops or in the market – wherever I went, people were constantly asking me about the ‘new Index’. Once I was sitting in a restaurant and somebody sent a bottle of wine over to show his support. But we were also aware the we cannot make an Index 2.0 – it should be something different.”

Veronika Munk and Szabolcs Dull, co-editors of Telex. Photo: János Bődey

A year in the making

Telex was launched in October and became an instant hit. After less than 10 months in operation, it boasts 600,000 unique users, and is now one of the media market leaders in Hungary. Out of the original Index staff, the founders have managed to employ 72 colleagues, the vast majority of whom are on full-time contracts.

Telex is financed mostly by its readers, with a smaller share of revenue coming from advertising. According to its latest “Transparency Report”, revenue from donations was 2.3 million euros to the end of April – the single biggest donor being Czech businessman Zdenek Bakala with 200,000 euros – and another 400,000 euros from advertising. Over 50,000 people support Telex, in most cases with small donations, which provides a sustainable basis, though the founders won’t rule out a subscription-based model in the longer run.

“What happened at Index was truly a turning point for the Hungarian media landscape. People suddenly became aware that information and content is not free of charge: somebody has to pay the price: either it is the reader, the advertisers or political circles that must foot the bill. Here at Telex, we believe it is not absolutely necessary to make either political or business deals; we would much rather serve our readers’ interest,” Dull says.

Judging from the meteoric growth of its readership, Telex’s readers are happy with the new site so far. But politics is another matter. Telex journalists have become used to being ignored by government politicians for some time; the minister in charge of the cabinet, Antal Rogan, who also oversees government communications, once famously said he does not know what Telex is. It is not unusual for Fidesz politicians to refer to critical news sites as “blogs”, in a deliberate attempt to undermine their importance and credibility.

What happened at Index was truly a turning point for the Hungarian media landscape

– Szabolcs Dull, co-editor of Telex

When Telex reached around 400,000 readers, the government’s attitude changed markedly. “From the very beginning, we were sending questions to the ministries and to government politicians, but we rarely received any answer. This is, of course, nothing new for the critical media in Hungary,” Munk says.

“But now some Fidesz politicians are already talking to us, not from the first tier, but from the second; some even give us interviews. We also see they are closely monitoring what we publish,” she says.

‘Critical, curious and correct’

Telex’s tagline – “critical, curious and correct” – will remain the journalists’ guiding light even in the case of a change in government in Hungary next year.

Munk vehemently rejects the label of opposition or left-wing journalist. She says it is understandable that politicians are interested in framing the narrative in a way they find beneficial, but journalists should go after the news, and what’s interesting and important for their readers, regardless of political colours.

What makes the Index/Telex story special is the courage of these young people, Ilona Kocsi, president of the National Association of Hungarian Journalists (MÚOSZ), tells BIRN.

In most cases where the government took over or destroyed a critical media outlet, its journalists scattered, pursuing individual career paths. There have been some cases where a new independent outlet was established, though only with a handful of the original journalists. Telex was entirely different – this was the first time when an entire team resigned in protest, stayed together and proved that even in the current hostile media environment, an alternative, independent news site could be built.

“The decisive difference is that this was not a one-man show, but a collective action, with a community which had faith in itself and had even the courage to take on risks,” Kocsi says.

In broader terms, it could also indicate a generational change is in the air. Not everybody is ready to succumb to Fidesz’s bullying power; now there is an example of Fidesz’s dominance being challenged and fought off.

Serbia’s Pro-Govt Media Link KRIK Investigators to Crime Gang

Posted on by Ivana Jeremic

Several pro-government tabloids on Friday ran front pages linking the widely respected investigative media portal KRIK to a brutal gang whose key members have been arrested and charged with murder, torture and drug trafficking.

The tabloid Informer accused KRIK of having “fired the first bullet” at the Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, suggesting that it had jeopardized Vucic’s safety in cooperation with the gang. Another pro-government tabloid, Objektiv, called KRIK “a mafia-slaughtering” organization.

The media campaign started after KRIK on Thursday published news quoting an alleged official statement that Veljko Belivuk, a leader of the “Principi” gang gave to the prosecution.

In it, Belivuk claimed he did many favours to the current regime, including breaking up protests of taxi drivers, preventing violence at the Pride parade, and stopping chants against Vucic at football games.

Belivuk said he also met Vucic once in person and other ruling party members.

The President afterwards denied he had ever met Belivuk, saying that he was willing to go to jail and pay for his time spent there if that turned out to be true.

KRIK editor Stevan Dojcinovic said on Friday that the article he published was carefully written, emphasizing that Belivuk could not be completely trusted, but that his allegations coincided with some things that were known in the past.

“We knew that this criminal group had strong connections in the police and politics, we knew that the government controlled the stands at the Partizan FC stadium through the Belivuk group, we knew about some things before,” Dojcinovic said, adding that they had not published all of Belivuk’s claims but only key matters of public interest.

“They called me personally and KRIK many names, but I have never seen such a sick and brutal statement, which shows that they are in great fear,” Dojcinovic added of his media assailants.

The gang’s connections to state officials, including a former senior police official and the current general secretary of the Progressive Party-led government, are documented.

Some members of the group formed part of the security detail at President Vucic’s inauguration in 2017, where they were caught on camera manhandling journalists.

Vucic’s 23- year-old son, Danilo, was photographed several times with various gang members. A KRIK journalist, Bojana Pavlovic, had her phone snatched away, to which police did not intervene, after she pictured the President’s son with members of the gang in June 2020.

However, after the arrest of Belivuk’s group in February, pro-government tabloids started publishing hostile stories about the gang along with material leaked from the police investigation.

Smear campaigns against KRIK and connecting it with members of the gang are also not new. Pro-government media in March this year also linked KRIK with Belivuk’s group, although KRIK, among some other Serbian investigative media, was the only one publishing stories about him and his gang.

KRIK is a non-profit organisation that for years has been engaged in exposing crime and corruption and has received many awards for its work.

It is part of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, OCCRP, an international non-profit organisation that is a consortium of investigative centers and independent media in 20 countries around the world.

Turkish President’s Aide Hails Curbs on Independent Media Funding

Posted on by Ivana Jeremic

Fahrettin Altun, President of Communications at the Turkish Presidency, has welcomed a new regulation on independent media funding from abroad, for halting foreign influences.

“It is obvious that there is a need to regulate media organisations which operate with funds from foreign state and institutions,” Altun told Turkey’s state-owned Anadolu Agency on Wednesday.

He added that the government will not allow any fifth-column activity under new guises.

“In an environment where some foreign leaders openly express their intentions and efforts to design Turkish politics, we cannot interpret that any foreign state or institution provides various funds to the media sector independently from the interests and goals in question,” Altun said. He added that the new regulation will be completed as soon as possible, to “protect public order and the people’s rights”.

The funding of independent media in Turkey came under the spotlight recently after it was shared that an American NGO, via various projects, was funding Medya Scope, one of the few remaining independent media outlets in the country, led by the veteran journalist Rusen Cakir.

As part of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s crackdown on critics, ownership of media outlets has dramatically changed over the last decade, and pressure on remaining independent media houses has intensified.

In 2018, Dogan Media Group, which was the largest mainstream media house in the country, owning several news agencies, TV channels, newspapers and magazines, was sold to Demiroren Holding, which is close to Erdogan’s government.

According to Reporters Without Borders, 90 per cent of Turkish media have now fallen under the direct control of the Turkish government.

Remaining independent media suffer strong government pressure, as well as fines and advertisement bans.

Under these circumstances, funding media institutions via projects has become one of the most important sources of income for many media organisations.

Turkish branches of international media houses have meantime increased their coverage of the country and have hired some of the independent journalists who lost their jobs because of government takeovers and other pressures.

Bosnia’s Judiciary Still Reluctant to Answer Emailed FOI Requests

Posted on by Ivana Jeremic

Nearly 10 per cent of judicial institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina which responded to BIRN’s FOI request insisted that requests for access to information be submitted in person or by mail, while some offered fax as an alternative.

BIRN sent inquiries to 96 courts and prosecutors’ offices on how they receive requests for free access to information.

The majority, 51, said they allow inquiries to be sent in a variety of ways, including email.

But of the 58 who responded, two prosecutors’ offices and four courts said they do not look at inquiries sent by email, which is common practice in most state institutions.

In their responses they said that they receive such requests exclusively by mail or in person, citing the lack of an electronic seal law and the impossibility of establishing the identities of the persons sending requests by email.

Experts criticised this as a way to restrict access to information for citizens and journalists.

The editor of the Capital.ba portal and president of the Banja Luka Journalists’ Club, Sinisa Vukelic, said such an approach makes it difficult for journalists to work.

“The message they are sending is that they do not want to change, and the only conclusion that can be drawn from that is that they are looking for every possible way to be less transparent,” Vukelic said.

Making inquiries in person, or sending them by mail, takes up valuable time when working on a text and prevents journalists from doing the stories they would otherwise do, if judicial institutions were more open, he added.

When you receive information after ten days, it is often by then unusable from a journalistic point of view, Vukelic noted.

Besides creating obstacles to sending inquiries, journalists face non-responses or delays in obtaining information from the judiciary. BIRN’s inquiries were not answered at all by 38 judicial institutions, and of the 58 that did answer, their answers arrived after 14 days.

BIRN’s recently published annual Freedom of Information report concluded that FOI laws in Bosnia and Herzegovina are outdated and do not meet the needs and expectations of the digital age.

Furthermore, Bosnia remains the only country in the Balkans that does not offer access to public records in electronic form.

Bulgaria Censured for Expelling Turkish Journalist Fleeing Arrest

Posted on by Ivana Jeremic

Bulgaria’s actions in handing back a journalist wanted by the Turkish authorities in 2016 were unlawful and were part of the systematic expulsion of refugees and migrants with no examination of the risk of torture, inhuman or degrading treatment, the European Court of Human Rights decided on Tuesday.

The Bulgarian state was ordered to pay the journalist 15,000 euros in damages.

The court in Strasbourg found that he was forced to leave Turkey amid a widespread crackdown in the aftermath of a failed coup in July 2016.

“I was working as a journalist in the town of Bozova. After the attempted coup, I was dismissed from the newspaper. I changed address and found out that the police had been looking for me at my former address,” said the journalist, according to the court’s legal summary of the case.

Along with eight other refugees from Turkey and Syria, he was captured in a truck at the Bulgarian-Romanian border on October 14, 2016.

Despite expressing his fear of return, at no point did the Bulgarian authorities assess the risk of torture, mistreatment and further political persecution, the court ruling said. He was not granted access to a lawyer or interpreter.

He was returned to Turkey within less than 24 hours. Upon arrival, he was detained, and in December 2019, sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison for membership of a terrorist organisation.

According to the European Court of Human Rights, the Turkish verdict was largely based on the fact that he had the messenger application Bylock installed on his mobile phone. The app is used by the movement led by cleric Fethullah Gulen, which the Turkish government claims was behind the attempted coup and regards as a terrorist organisation.

“The ECtHR’s decision provides belated but important satisfaction for the applicant. It sets a strong counterpoint to Bulgaria’s longstanding practice of denying refugees protection from persecution and handing them straight back to their persecutors,” said the journalist’s lawyer, Carsten Gericke.

There has been no immediate official reaction from Bulgaria to the court’s ruling.

A BIRN investigation in October 2019 found that over 250 Turkish citizens requested asylum in Kosovo, Bosnia, North Macedonia and Bulgaria following the failed coup in Turkey.

Balkan Region’s Media Pluralism Stagnated in Pandemic, Report Warns

Posted on by Ivana Jeremic

Balkan countries have experienced a general stagnation or deterioration in terms of media pluralism and media freedoms during 2020, shows a new study, “Media Pluralism Monitor 2021”, published by the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom at the European University Institute.

These trends can be observed through the four fundamental risk areas encompassed in the study: fundamental protection, market plurality, political independence and social inclusiveness.

Medium and high-risk factors for Balkan countries

In the area of fundamental protection, which among other things encompasses the protection of freedom of information, right to information and observing of journalistic standards, North Macedonia scores best out of all the Balkan countries in the study.

On a scale from 0 to 100 when scores between 0 and 33 per cent are marked as low risk factors, scores between 34 to 66 per cent mark medium risk, and scores between 67 and 100 per cent indicate high risk, only North Macedonia was marked as low risk, with a score of 32 per cent.

The rest of the countries were put in the medium risk group. Croatia scored 42 per cent, Montenegro 43 per cent, Serbia 45 per cent, Slovenia 48 per cent and Albania 59 per cent.

In the area of market plurality, which looked at issues like transparency of media ownership, news media concentration and owners’ influence over the editorial policies of the outlets, Montenegro was ranked best with 62 per cent, followed by North Macedonia with 64 per cent, both being ranked medium risk.

The rest of the countries were marked high risk. Serbia scored 69 per cent, Croatia 71 per cent, Slovenia 76 per cent while Albania ranked worst, with 89 per cent.

The third area concerns over political independence, which measures indicators such as editorial autonomy, state regulation and resources allocated to media and the independence of funding. All countries from the region in the survey, bar Slovenia, were marked as medium risk.

North Macedonia again scored best with 50 per cent, followed by Serbia on 57 per cent, Croatia with 61 per cent, Montenegro and Albania which both scored 64 per cent. Slovenia was marked as a country of high risk with a score of 73 per cent.

The fourth fundamental risk area in the report, social inclusiveness, encompasses indicators like access to media by minorities, as well as for local and regional communities, access to media for women, media literacy as well as protection against illegal or harmful speech.

In this risk area, North Macedonia again scored best with 58 per cent, followed by Croatia with 61 per cent, the only two countries marked with a medium risk factor.

Serbia scored 67 per cent, Slovenia 70 per cent, Albania 72 per cent and Montenegro scored worst, with 73 per cent.


Illustration: Pixabay

General stagnation or decline

Starting with Slovenia, the report noted that all monitored areas showed a slight or significant deterioration compared to the findings of the Media Pluralism Monitor 2020.

“Unlike many other EU countries, Slovenia and its government did not enable or promote any financial, fiscal, or tax instrument, strategy, or other potential intervention aimed at strengthening media plurality or, for example, social inclusiveness” during the pandemic of 2020, the report noted.

For Croatia, another EU country, the report noted that the regulation of the media sector has been stagnant for years, which has resulted in the deterioration of media pluralism.

The report said that, “there is no overarching media strategy, or initiative, to tackle specifically local issues such as poor protection of the journalistic profession and standards. The country has seen a surge of SLAPPs and defamation charges aimed at journalists”, adding: “Political interference without considerations of public interests is seen in many appointment procedures: from the public service media to the main media regulator.”

On Albania, the report noted that the country is weakest in terms of market pluralism, where it “faces a high level of news media concentration in its audio visual media market, while the viability of most outlets – apart from a number of family owned conglomerates that control the lion share of revenues and audiences, is weak”.

In the area of fundamental protection, Albania should do more to increase professional and journalistic standards, the report said, in order to avoid the threat of government intervention to regulate online media content, as proposed by the current ruling Socialist Party.

As for Montenegro, the report said the country’s legal framework is suitable for the development of media pluralism, but more in a quantitative than in a qualitative sense.

While the process of establishing media, especially online, is extremely free, there is no effort to boost professional or ethical standards. In addition, efforts to create and implement rules for digital news media that limit political influence have generally been sporadic, insufficient, and ineffective, the report said.

“Existing legal solutions allow political power to control the public broadcaster and the other media at the national and local levels, the report further states, especially through their dependency on public financing” the report also noted.

The report also said that the establishment of the state-level Fund for Encouraging Media Pluralism and Diversity is an innovation that may yet prove its worth, provided that strong control over the distribution of resources is established.

When it comes to Serbia, the general conclusion is that while the country has a solid legal framework covering traditional media, full enforcement of this is missing.

Some highlighted points are political and state advertising in media, lack of transparent media ownership and the lack of protection for media workers and instances of attacks on journalists that remain unsanctioned.

“During the 2020 election campaign, the so-called functionary campaign turned out to be the weakest element in media regulation, so this issue should be arranged by the Law.  The area of political advertising and reporting on spending on online platforms campaigns should be regulated by the Law as well. Political advertisement should be equally accessible to all political players, under the same conditions,” the report said.

Of the six countries from the region, North Macedonia had the highest overall score. The report notes that the situation in 2020 “significantly improved” compared to 2016, the last year of the former authoritarian PM Nikola Gruevski who was ousted in 2017.

The report notes that media freedoms are broader, journalists and their associations are no longer exposed to serious physical attacks and pressures, and the regulator is fairly independent and more efficient.

However, risks remain present: “The market is fragmented, most media are economically weak, and the working status of journalists is still unstable,” the report noted.

In general, for all countries, the report points out that for most of the countries’ populations, especially the young, online media have become their main source of information, and with this comes their increased exposure to disinformation and hate speech.

This creates a new challenge for all these countries’ regulatory policies, the report concludes.

The Media Pluralism Monitor 2021 was published as a research tool designed to identify potential risks to media pluralism in member states of the European Union and candidate countries.

The project, under a preparatory action of the European Parliament, was supported by a grant awarded by the European Commission to the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom at the European University Institute.

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