Budapest: A year after Europe’s flagship media freedom law began to bite, its defenders are counting how little has changed. The main obligations of the European Media Freedom Act became applicable in August 2025, yet the Commission’s 2026 rule of law review finds that national governments have been slow, and often superficial, in turning the text into practice.

The law was meant to shield journalists and public broadcasters from political pressure. It bars authorities from forcing reporters to reveal their sources, restricts the use of spyware against them, and demands transparency about who owns a newspaper or television channel. It also created the European Board for Media Services, a body designed to raise the alarm when a member state leans on its press.

On paper those are strong guarantees. In practice, watchdogs say, implementation has stalled across most of the Union. Media freedom groups reporting alongside the rule of law exercise describe threats to the independence and funding of public service broadcasters that remain very real, and a climate of harassment, much of it online, that keeps growing.

The pressure is not spread evenly. Successive Commission assessments have singled out a handful of governments, among them Hungary, Poland and Greece, where political control over outlets, opaque ownership and intimidation of reporters have hardened into patterns rather than isolated incidents. In those countries the new rules collide most directly with the interests of the people meant to enforce them.

Broadcasters’ associations argue that the tools exist and only the will is missing. The European Broadcasting Union has urged capitals to apply the safeguards in full rather than treat them as aspirations, warning that a law admired abroad means nothing if governments quietly ignore it at home. The companion Anti-SLAPP Directive, meant to stop powerful figures from burying critics under abusive lawsuits, has met the same fate of shallow transposition.

Supporters of the reform insist the timeline was always going to be long, and that a single year cannot undo a decade of backsliding. They point to the new board as a forum that did not exist before, and to a reporting cycle that at least forces uncomfortable facts into public view each summer.

Critics counter that reports without consequences change nothing. Unless the Commission moves from documenting problems to opening infringement cases, they argue, editors in the most exposed capitals will keep learning that the guarantees written in the European Media Freedom Act stop at the border of political convenience. The second year of the law, they say, will reveal whether enforcement has any teeth at all.