How has the Parliament protected our right to information?

In this year of elections more than ever, everyone needs access to fair and unbiased reporting. You might have noticed worrying trends in the news about media politicisation and a lack of transparency around media ownership across the European Union. With threats, harassment, public shaming and even assassinations of journalists having a considerable chilling effect on the media landscape, Parliament has advocated better protection for press freedom and media pluralism in the EU and beyond. Its November 2020 resolution, for example, raised awareness of attempts by some EU governments to silence critical media and undermine media freedom and pluralism. So what has the Parliament done to protect our media environment?

The European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), the first ever EU-level regulation on media freedom, pluralism and protecting journalists, applies since April 2024. It ensures that the rules are the same for media online and offline, throughout the EU. It addresses the risk of ‘media capture’ through hidden funding, lack of transparency in the ownership of media outlets, the use of spyware, and provides guarantees against financial distress and market concentration. Parliament succeeded in removing a proposed reference to ‘protecting national security’ that might give state authorities a ‘blank cheque’ to spy on journalists. The act states that EU countries will have to respect media service providers’ editorial freedom. In line with Parliament’s request, all public authorities will have to publish annual accounts of their public advertising expenditure, including when advertising on online platforms. Parliament also ensured that very big online platforms, sometimes known as ‘gateways’, have to give a statement of reasons before they restrict content.

At the time of her murder in 2017, Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was facing 43 different vexatious libel suits. To end this type of harassment of journalists – strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) – the EU adopted its Anti-SLAPP Directive in April 2024. The law obliges EU countries to ensure courts can dismiss these kinds of cases as unfounded, and do so early, under a mechanism for early dismissal of abusive cases,to avoid lengthy and cumbersome civil procedures. To help EU countries organise measures to deal with criminal proceedings brought abusively against journalists and other activists, the European Commission has provided guidance in a non-binding recommendation.

This way, Parliament used both its law-making and agenda-setting powers to promote democratic participation, fight disinformation and support media freedom and pluralism. Parliament’s powers fall broadly into six, often overlapping, domains: law-making, the budget, scrutiny of the executive, external relations, and, to a lesser extent, constitutional affairs and agenda-setting. This graphic shows more examples of areas where Parliament used one or more of its different powers to influence legislation:

For a fuller picture of the European Parliament’s activity over the past five years, take a look at our publication Examples of Parliament’s impact: 2019 to 2024: Illustrating the powers of the European Parliament, from which this case is drawn.