Misha Glenny is a British journalist. Alexandra Borchardt is a journalism professor at the Berlin University of the Arts. Václav Štětka is a senior lecturer at Loughborough University. Aleksander Kaczorowski is editor-in-chief at Aspen Review Central Europe. All four are members of the Committee for Editorial Independence at the Czech media group Economia.
PRAGUE — Press freedom is under assault, and not only in places like Hong Kong and Belarus.
It’s under pressure in the European Union as well — in particular in Hungary and Poland, where legal maneuvers and litigation are being used to silence what’s left of the independent media.
In February, the Hungarian beverage company Hell Energy Drink brought a lawsuit against Forbes Hungary after it published a list of the richest Hungarians. Forbes was forced to recall the issue from the newsstands because the privately owned family drink company argued that the magazine had breached their privacy under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.
Wealthy plaintiffs using GDPR as a weapon against the press is a frightening new method of intimidating the media. This was certainly not the intention of its authors.
“Across Europe, powerful and wealthy people are using the law to try and intimidate and silence the journalists disclosing inconvenient truths in the public interest” — Free speech advocates Index on Censorship
Meanwhile in Poland, fresh from President Andrzej Duda’s election victory, the ruling Law and Justice Party continues to use the courts to threaten Gazeta Wyborcza, the country’s most important independent media outlet. Jarosław Kurski, deputy editor-in-chief of Gazeta, told the Committee to Protect Journalists that the party has been “flooding us with lawsuits since last year.”
These examples are just among the most egregious in a wider European trend in which businesses and governments are using libel law to smother legitimate journalistic investigation into their activities.
“Across Europe, powerful and wealthy people are using the law to try and intimidate and silence the journalists disclosing inconvenient truths in the public interest,” the free speech advocates Index on Censorship wrote in a recent report. “These legal threats and actions are crippling not only for the media but for our democracies.”
Journalism is a precarious profession at the best of times. A large fine in the libel courts can cost your livelihood and possibly your home. Misha Glenny, a British journalist and one of the authors of this article, is often asked whether he feared for his life after publishing “McMafia,” a book about the globalization of organized crime.
“Actually, I was more frightened about being sued by a Russian oligarch in the London courts than I was about a bullet in the back of the neck,” is his answer.
The growing threat of legal action adds another element of danger to an environment in which critical journalists have been deprived of their livelihoods — or their lives.
In Budapest last month, the management of Index.hu, the country’s most influential news portal, sacked the editor-in-chief, Szabolcs Dull, after he warned against growing political pressure on the website. More than 70 other staffers followed him out the door in protest.
In Slovakia, the investigative journalist Jan Kuciák was shot dead, along with his partner Martina Kušnírová, in 2018. A year earlier, the Maltese blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb. Both had been investigating links between organized crime and politics.
We would have hoped that the European Union would be unequivocal in its condemnation of media suppression. Instead, more and more member countries are suppressing freedom of speech and tolerating attacks on journalists.
There was an opportunity to clamp down on this behavior during the negotiations for the coronavirus rescue package. In July, the EU’s vice president for values and transparency, Věra Jourová, told Index.hu that the Hungarian media organization “can count on my support.” She argued that the disbursement of the emergency coronavirus funds should be conditional on respect for EU values.
Instead, following pressure from Hungary and Poland, the European Council and European Commission backed away from their previous insistence that recipients of EU funds adhere to the rule of law. We have yet to see the Commission take effective action on an EU country that is violating the rule of law.
If the EU won’t stand up for the rights of journalists, it’s up to us to ensure there’s somebody in place who can.
It’s over concerns about this worrying trend that the writers of this article accepted an invitation last year to form the Committee for Editorial Independence — designed to call out any proprietorial interference in the editorial line of Economia, the Czech Republic’s largest independent media group.
This was an initiative of the media group owner himself, Zdeněk Bakala, but journalists working for the company have welcomed our role. We will have no hesitation in defending them if Bakala or his associates attempt to interfere with their editorial line.
Our committee believes that this initiative could serve as a model that can be replicated across the EU. We challenge all media houses to establish their own, verifiably independent mechanism to defend the right of press freedom from corporate or government interference.
If the EU won’t stand up for the rights of journalists, it’s up to us to ensure there’s somebody in place who can.