The battle against disinformation, for freedom of the press and the right to information has given rise to the European media freedom law which, for the first time, seeks to protect newsrooms throughout the EU from the undue influence of political power and promote pluralism and transparency so that it is known who finances them. The regulation, which came into force in May after months of debate, is the framework on which the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, will base his measures for “democratic regeneration” and against hoaxes. European regulations include safeguards to guarantee the independence of the media and prevent them from being used for “political purposes” and focus on mechanisms to fight disinformation; a major problem throughout Europe that Brussels is trying to tackle with various measures and that a new European Advisory Council will also analyze.
The EU regulation will have to be fully in place in the 27 member states in August 2025. And it is very clear: the country authorities must apply it and if they propose national measures they must be in accordance with that European framework; It is the formula to avoid everything that sounds like censorship and which is a great concern in the community institutions after the episodes of media control and authoritarian drift that have been experienced with Hungary and Poland.
It was these initiatives by the wayward members of the community club – Warsaw has already redirected itself after the departure of the ultra-conservative Government – and the attacks on freedom of the press that promoted European regulation in 2022. The Media Law includes a broad battery of measures and establishes, for example, a series of transparency requirements on media ownership—so that who is behind it is not hidden—and on state advertising, to fix the “risk of covert subsidy and undue political influence.”
With the new law in hand, this information, the name of the owners (direct or indirect) who own packages of shares that influence the operation and decisions of these media, must be available and accessible to citizens. Also all the data on state resources that are injected into these media. “The opaque and biased allocation of such funds is a powerful instrument to exert influence on the editorial freedom of media service providers,” says the regulation, which speaks of the risk that these funds will be used as covert financing “to acquire an unfair political or commercial advantage or favorable coverage.”
The European law also establishes new guarantees that seek to reinforce the independence of public media from political power and independence safeguards, by establishing, for example, that appointments must be transparent and clear. It sets procedures to verify media concentration and establishes a new “layer of protection” for publishers against arbitrary content removal decisions made by large online platforms. For example, the regulation stipulates that content published by media outlets on social networks such as X (formerly Twitter) cannot be immediately removed without prior notice.
Brussels has also designed the law to protect journalists and their sources – in fact it talks about the prohibition of installing software spy-. But it does not regulate the content, nor does it delve into the definition of media, beyond the enormously broad one made by European treaties. And that is one of the great current problems, where new platforms and attempts at external and internal interference make an update necessary, community sources specify.
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The EU also has codes of practice against disinformation and has passed two laws on digital platforms to force them to remove content that is harmful, related to terrorism or harmful to national security. But there is no progress in regulating in this sense but in establishing committees of experts, which analyze the environment and ensure that things are being done well, and in programs so that it is the public, the users, who detect and flag false or misleading content.
With the new regulation, an independent European Committee of Media Services will be created, made up of representatives of national media authorities or organizations and which will also include the European Commission and a system for controlling the ownership of media. media that allows providing a database by country that contains that information.
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