Nicosia: A year ago the Union gave itself a landmark law to shield journalists from political pressure and hidden owners. Twelve months on, the law is on the books everywhere and fully at work almost nowhere, as member states drag their feet on the machinery it demands.
The European Media Freedom Act entered full application on 8 August 2025. It promises protection for editorial independence, transparency about who owns news outlets, and limits on the surveillance of reporters. The ambition was to halt the slow erosion of press freedom that had crept across several democracies.
The gap between promise and practice is already visible. The Act requires member states to run a mechanism that assesses media takeovers likely to threaten pluralism, so that a single owner cannot quietly swallow a country’s newspapers and broadcasters. France, among others, has yet to put such a mechanism in place, leaving a central safeguard on paper only.
That lag matters because concentration of ownership is where much of the danger lies. When a handful of proprietors control what most citizens read and watch, editorial lines can bend toward the interests of the owner or the government that favours them. The Act tried to build a filter; without national bodies to run it, the filter does not switch on.
Public broadcasters were another target of the law. It insists that their funding be stable and their leadership appointed through transparent procedures, rather than handed to political loyalists. Media unions across the Union say the test will come the next time a government tries to install an ally atop a state broadcaster and finds the Act standing in the way.
The surveillance provisions have drawn particular attention. The Act restricts the use of spyware against journalists and bars authorities from forcing reporters to reveal their sources except in narrow circumstances. Digital-rights advocates welcomed the language but warn that national-security exceptions could hollow it out if courts read them broadly.
The Commission’s own rule-of-law monitoring has flagged uneven progress. Some member states moved quickly to align their laws; others treated the deadline as aspirational. Enforcement ultimately runs through a European board of media regulators and, when disputes escalate, through the courts, a route that takes time and appetite.
Newsrooms, meanwhile, face pressures the Act cannot fully reach. Advertising revenue keeps migrating to global platforms, local titles keep closing, and artificial intelligence is reshaping how audiences find news. A law about ownership and independence does little to fix an economic model that has been unravelling for two decades.
Advocates still count the first year as progress, because Europe now has a common baseline where before it had a patchwork. The harder work lies ahead, in the dull administrative business of standing up the bodies and procedures the Act requires. Until member states finish that job, press freedom in the Union will rest on a law whose safeguards are only half awake.
