Independent Media in Central and Southeast Europe Under ‘Assault’ – Report

The report, Fighting Words: Journalism Under Assault in Central and Eastern Europe, issued on Wednesday by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the University of Oxford evaluates the situation of the media in the region by drawing on interviews with about a hundred journalists in 16 countries during 2019.

"In Europe, one of the safest continents in the world for press freedom, three journalists have been murdered in the last three years," author Meera Selva of the Reuters Institute writes.

The report goes on to list the deaths of Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta, a country out of the area of study, Jan Kuciak in Slovakia and Viktoria Marinova in Bulgaria, all killed while reporting "on government corruption and organised crime". 

"They [the killings] happened in a climate where many journalists have been attacked and undermined and discredited by politicians, where the media have been captured or financially weakened, and where lawsuits have been used to systematically hamper and inhibit the pursuit of investigative, independent journalism," the study said.

The report recalls that the 27-year-old Slovak journalist shot dead alongside his fiancée in February 2018 was part of a group of reporters who then prime minister Robert Fico in November 2016 called "anti-Slovak prostitutes" who "don't inform" but just "fight with the government".

Similarly aggressive language has been used against journalists in recent months in the Czech Republic, which two years ago dropped from 23rd place to 40th in the World Press Freedom Index, partly due to the concentration of media ownership "driven by the current Prime Minister Andrej Babis".

In the Western Balkans, the report notes, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama "frequently...