The European Parliament’s Culture and Education (CULT) committee adopted the Media Freedom Act (EMFA) on Thursday, September 7th, which means EU member states are one big step closer to handing over their say in regulating their media to Brussels.
If it becomes law in the next months, European media organizations would enjoy more editorial freedom, but some say the new law would violate member state sovereignty, while it is also feared to create a legal loophole that will allow disinformation to grow exponentially overnight.
Despite the criticism, the MEPs adopted the file with 24 votes supporting it, 3 against it, and 4 abstentions. The regulation will now be sent before a plenary vote in early October and could be finalized by the end of the year.
The EMFA was proposed by the Commission last year, with the aim of promoting a more pluralistic, transparent, and fair media landscape in Europe. In theory, the law would protect public service organizations’ editorial freedom by requiring governments to provide stable, multiannual funding frameworks.
The legislation will also ensure that revenues from state advertising are equally distributed, require all media to be fully transparent about their ownership and funding, and ban the use of spyware on journalists. What’s more, it will also create a central regulatory agency to monitor the implementation and upholding of the new rules.
Politically motivated centralization
The EMFA was first agreed on by the member state representatives in the Council in late June. Although initially opposed by France, Germany, and Denmark as well, only two countries voted against it in the end: Poland and Hungary.
There’s a good reason for that: both countries suspect that they are the real targets of the legislation, that there are political reasons behind Brussels’ attempt to take over key competencies in national-level media regulation, and that “media pluralism” is just a code-word for the EU-mandated leftist dominance of European press.
This could easily have some truth to it, given that EMFA was directly influenced by the EU’s Media Pluralism Monitor’s 2021 report, which painted a distorted image of the Polish and Hungarian media landscape while disguised as objective analysis, despite being written by carefully selected and overwhelmingly leftist “experts” in each country.
Therefore, if the EMFA was designed specifically to deal with the allegedly unequal playing field in Poland and Hungary, one can only expect that the measures in mind would not benefit either of the two conservative governments—or any other in Europe, for that matter.
Disinformation loophole?
The greatest controversy around the new law is not even about the sovereignty issue, but an instrument watchdogs fear would create a legal loophole to allow the unrestrained spread of disinformation within the EU.
Article 17 of EMFA will prohibit online platforms from censoring content that belongs to media organizations and is otherwise legal in their respective countries for at least 24 hours after publication. In practice, this equals giving a blank cheque to rogue actors “who produce industrial scale disinformation to harm democracies,” as the Nobel-winner journalist Maria Ressa put it.
According to European Digital Rights (EDRi), a leading watchdog focusing on the EU’s online sphere, the law would protect any content regardless of whether the author is a registered or merely self-declared media organization. Besides, 24 hours is more than enough for any piece of disinformation to be disseminated among the public, and it’s impossible to combat any harmful content after being shared in various chat groups.
As EDRi explained, the controversial article clearly undermines one of the main goals of the recently finalized Digital Services Act (DSA), which is to create a “safe, predictable, and trusted online environment.” Sebastian Becker, the organization’s policy advisor added:
[The] 24-hour must-carry obligation misses the bigger picture. Instead of solving the structural problems between media outlets and online platforms, it could open the door to more online disinformation.
