Journalists and media actors sometimes even face several types of attacks at the same time, such as
a verbal and a physical attack
performed within the same incident by the same aggressor.
In this section we show how
many alerts involved a certain
type of attack.
The types of attacks are grouped into 5 main
types with detailed information
provided below:
Physical: In more than 1 out of 5 incidents (21.1%, 132 alerts) media actors were
physically attacked. In 49 incidents (7.8%) media actors were injured. Three journalists were killed: the investigative journalist Peter R. de Vries in the Netherlands, the
television reporter and veteran crime reporter Giorgos Karaivaz in Greece, and the
local radio presenter Hazım Özsu in Turkey.
Verbal: In more than 4 out of 10 incidents (41.1%, 257 alerts), media actors were
verbally abused. This includes intimidation/threatening (25.2%, 158 alerts), insult/ab‐
use (78 alerts), discrediting (32), harassment (24) as well as bullying/trolling (10) targeting media actors.
Property: In more than 1 out of 10 incidents (11.8%, 74 alerts), property was attacked.
This includes equipment (45 alerts), personal belongings (4 alerts), but also attacks
to other property such as cars or houses (21), as well as hacking/DDoS attacks (6
alerts).
Legal: In one quarter of all incidents (25.4%, 159 alerts), media actors faced legal
consequences. This includes civil lawsuits (33 alerts), arrest/detention/imprison‐
ment (31), criminal charges (24), interrogation (19), legal measures like laws restrict‐
ing press and media freedom (18), surveillance and interception of journalistic data
(13), conviction (9), loss of employment (8), defamation (5), violation of anonymity
(3), expansion of state outlets (1), or bribery/payments (1).
Censorship: In more than 1 out of 10 incidents (11.3%, 71 alerts), media actors faced
censorship. This includes arbitrary denial of accreditation or registration (incl.
blocked access to events or press conferences) (33 alerts), blocked access to inform‐
ation (e.g. blocked websites or no answers to enquiries) (24 alerts), commercial inter‐
ference (13 alerts), disinformation (3), and journalistic work not being published (2).
Attacked while covering demonstrations,
harassed online for reporting on
COVID-19 and measures to fight it, or
sued by private companies trying to avoid
publication of damaging information.
These are just some examples of the
threats received by journalists and media
workers in Europe in 2021.
The current monitoring report for the Me‐
dia Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR) has
focused on summarising media freedom
violations across EU Member States, can‐
didate countries, and the United Kingdom
from January until December 2021.
Throughout the re‐
porting period, 626
alerts were docu‐
mented on Mapping
Media Freedom
(MapMF), ranging
from verbal attacks
to legal incidents. 1,063 individuals or me‐
dia entities in 30 countries were subject
to one or more press freedom violations,
including the murder of 3 journalists.
2021 was marked – as the previous year –
by the consequences of the COVID-19
pandemic. In fact, in 2021, more than 1 in
4 incidents (26.5% of the alerts) were
linked to COVID, a figure comparable to
the one in 2020 (27.7%). The second year
of the pandemic started with the deploy‐
ment of vaccines and growing unrest over
confinement measures and health certi‐
ficates to access public spaces. Protests
against the implementation of these
policies increased, and in some cases,
journalists covering them became a target
and suffered violent attacks, as explained
in the thematic section of the report.
Most media freedom violations took place
at demonstrations, where 178 alerts were
recorded, 28.4% of the total. While not all
of these attacks were linked to the pan‐
demic, those countries with weekly
COVID protests such as Italy and Ger‐
many experienced several attacks on
journalists covering these events. It is im‐
portant to note that the high number of
alerts in Germany should not be directly
attributed to a deteriorated media free‐
dom landscape but to an extensive monit‐
oring network in the country which is not
yet as extended in other states. There
was an increase in attacks taking place
online – extensively covered in one of the
thematic sections of the report – which
rose from 14% of alerts in 2020 to 16,7%
in 2021.
As for types of attacks, the most common
ones included were verbal attacks (41.1%) such as intimidation, harassment or in‐
sults, followed by legal incidents (25.4%),
physical attacks (21.1%), attacks to prop‐
erty (11.8%), and censorship (11.3%) such
as arbitrary denial of accreditation or re‐
gistration. In fact, in 2021, these types of
censorship incidents increased to 5.3%.
Surveillance incidents, with 2.1% of alerts
in 2021, were quantitatively a minor topic
but – as the Pegasus files have shown –
they affected journalists in several coun‐
tries, as explained in the thematic section
on online attacks. Attacks perpetrated by
private individuals accounted for 41.2% of
the alerts, a rise compared to the same
number in 2020 (37.7%). They were fol‐
lowed by attacks by police (18.5%) and le‐
gislation (12.3%).
The current report is divided in 4 main
sections which offer quantitative and
qualitative analysis of the main attacks
perpetrated against journalists and media
workers during the year. The first section
provides a general picture and includes
visualisations and statistics that summar‐
ise the data and explain the main findings
of the monitoring project. The analysis is
followed by thematic reports focusing on
two of the most relevant topics spotted
by the monitoring partners throughout
the year: attacks and threats linked to
COVID-19 and online attacks. The third
section focuses on country studies from
the following states: Germany, Turkey,
France, Italy, Serbia, Slovenia, Poland,
Greece, the Netherlands, Spain, Albania,
Montenegro, and Hungary.
The 2021 report has also added a new fi‐
nal section focusing on positive develop‐
ments for media freedom that took place
during the year, such as the creation by
the European Commission of a new Ex‐
pert group on Strategic Lawsuits Against
Public Participation (SLAPPs) or the start
of consultations for the upcoming
European Media Freedom Act, officially
announced by President Ursula von der
Leyen in her State of the Union address.
The report has been compiled by the In‐
ternational Press Institute (IPI), the
European Federation of Journalists (EFJ),
and the European Centre for Press and
Media Freedom (ECPMF), in the context
of the joint Media Freedom Rapid Re‐
sponse project which monitors and sup‐
ports journalists, media workers, and plat‐
forms that have been threatened. The
Media Freedom Rapid Response was
launched in March 2020. Past reports can
be downloaded on the MapMF and MFRR
websites, and the alerts for this report
can be accessed through the Alert Ex‐
plorer, which is constantly updated and
collects and visualises all alerts docu‐
mented by the monitoring partners. Fur‐
thermore, an additional Fact Sheet focus‐
sing on European Union Member States
was published in parallel.
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