World Press Freedom Day

 Media freedom in Europe continued to face major challenges in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During this twelvemonth reporting period, the MapMF platform documented 166 different media freedom violations linked in some way to COVID-19. These involved attacks on 252 different persons or entities in 19 countries. Many of these alerts involved phys‐ ical and online attacks on journalists reporting on anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protests across Europe. Sixteen cases were recorded which involved serious attacks on journalists or media workers who then required medical treatment. Overall, more than a quarter of all alerts (26.5%) recorded during 2021 were re‐lated to the pandemic, underscoring the persistent threats that the pandemic faces to independent journalism. The re‐ spective COVID-19 related alerts can be viewed here. These attacks on the free press came in many forms. Nearly one in three incidents (31.9% and 53 alerts) involved physical at‐ tacks, including 16 incidents ...

  Journalists and media actors sometimes even fac e 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), hara...

  Media freedom in Slovenia continued to decline in 2021 under pressure from the government of Prime Minister Janez Janša. The country saw the seventh highest number of alerts on the MapMF platform with 29 alerts and 41 attacked persons or entities related to media, leading the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR) to launch an online fact-finding mission in May to assess the situation. Increasing pressure on independent journalism during this time centred on the financial suffocation of the Slovenian Press Agency (STA) and increasing political in‐ terference at the public broadcaster. Con‐ cerningly, many of these violations were recorded while Slovenia held the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU.  At the beginning of the year, UKOM, the Government Communications Directorate, suspended the financing of the STA for the second time in three months, in what media rights groups called an attempt to destabilise the agency through financial blackmail. The PM and leading...