Stagnation has become the most damning verdict a watchdog can hand down, and it is the word now hanging over the bloc’s media landscape. The Liberties Rule of Law Report 2026, assembled by civil society organisations across the Union, concludes that the dominant trend in press freedom is not dramatic collapse but inertia. In a climate where pressures on journalists are mounting, standing still is not neutral. It is a slow form of retreat.
The findings make uncomfortable reading for governments that prefer to measure themselves against the bloc’s worst performers. Only a small number of member states recorded measurable improvements, while most demonstrated either stagnation or outright regression. Bulgaria, Croatia, Italy, Slovakia and the Netherlands all reported rising levels of harassment and physical attacks against reporters, a reminder that hostility toward the press is not confined to the Union’s perennial problem cases but is creeping into its founding members.
The catalogue of grievances is familiar precisely because so little has changed. Threats to media pluralism persist as ownership concentrates in fewer hands. Public service broadcasters remain exposed to political pressure over budgets and appointments. State advertising continues to flow with little transparency, rewarding friendly outlets and starving critical ones. And strategic lawsuits against public participation, the costly intimidation suits known as SLAPPs, are still deployed to drain newsrooms of time and money.
What gives the report its sting is the arithmetic of inaction. Around 85 percent of the 27 outstanding media-related recommendations were first issued back in 2022, meaning capitals have had three full years to act and have not. The list of laggards is not limited to the usual suspects either. Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany and Ireland all carry unimplemented recommendations, undercutting the comfortable assumption that media freedom is a problem only for newer or eastern members.
Legislation was supposed to change this. The European Media Freedom Act promised common safeguards for editorial independence, ownership transparency and the protection of sources, while a separate directive was meant to blunt the SLAPP threat. Yet progress on putting the media freedom rules into practice has been limited, and transposition of the anti-SLAPP directive remains patchy. The gap between what the Union writes into law and what it enforces on the ground is precisely where credibility leaks away.
That gap matters beyond the press gallery. A bloc that lectures candidate countries on judicial independence and pluralism while tolerating drift among its own members invites the charge of double standards. Enlargement negotiations, rule-of-law conditionality on funds and the Union’s wider claim to democratic leadership all rest on the assumption that the rules apply evenhandedly. Each year that recommendations go unmet erodes that assumption a little further.
None of this means the tools are worthless. Reports of this kind exist to create a paper trail that makes inaction harder to hide, and the Commission’s own annual cycle gives reformers a yardstick to wield. The harder question is whether documentation without consequences can shift behaviour. Press freedom advocates increasingly argue that recommendations need teeth, in the form of clear penalties or funding conditions, rather than another year of polite reminders. Until then, stagnation will keep doing the quiet work that censorship once did more crudely.
