Media and Politics in Europe

Unemployment has gone down. By not much, admittedly, but it is traveling in the right direction at just below double digits. Moreover, Italy's still fairly strong on export – another positive element

the flourishing and promising feminist writing by Michela Marzano, Michela Murgia, Claudia Torrisi, Igiaba Scego and many others, also prolific in the press (women read more than men, and that is even truer for Italy), which makes for an interesting development in a country still at the mercy of ultra-conservative undercurrents

Its ranking in the 2019 World Press Freedom Index is 43: Up by 3 compared to last year (46th) and 9 against 2017 (52nd). Yet, hundreds of journalists are still risking their lives. Any progress in this field is to be looked at with caution. Nonetheless, Italy used to be worryingly marked in red on the index maps; and it's orange now.

Gromov’s sessions bring together the heads of all Russia’s major public and private TV companies — Channel One, VGTRK, NTV, TVC, REN TV, and Channel Five — plus representatives of key government agencies, including the office of the president, the government, and the parliament. A Kremlin official responsible for election campaigns also participates, along with foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova

A prominent Russian broadcast journalist tells a story of needing money to make a documentary and asking for a meeting with Gromov. To his surprise, Gromov not only met with him, but immediately started making calls to line up the financing. The journalist asked Gromov why he didn’t have a subordinate make the calls. “Shit doesn’t work if I don’t do it myself,” Gromov told him. That’s Gromov’s approach in all things television. He alone has the authority to order state channels to air a news item. He also retains the authority to prevent news from being shown.

in most cases, no call is needed. The heads of television channels attend weekly meetings at Gromov’s office at the presidential administration building in Moscow, where they are told what must be broadcast and what is forbidden.

Vladimir Putin began his presidency by distancing Russia’s influential oligarchs from power. In particular, he deprived them of their national TV stations: Vladimir Gusinsky lost NTV and Boris Berezovsky lost ORT (now Channel One). The process involved both criminal cases and arrests; first Gusinsky, then Berezovsky were forced to leave Russia by the end of 2000.

instructions may also invoke restrictions on coverage in so-called “control regions.” If an important event is taking place — the election of a governor or the construction of a World Cup stadium, for example — the stations are forbidden to air negative information about anything happening in the entire region

The Attorney General’s Office, the Ministry of the Interior, the Investigative Committee, and other state bodies also generate large flows of information through their press services. Representatives of these services also attend a special regular meeting with Gromov, who dispenses instructions on what not to cover.

Gromov is also widely considered a master at managing up. Like few others, he knows how to obtain the decisions he wants from Putin, sometimes by selectively presenting unflattering information.

the presidential press pool is also a source of income for people close to Gromov

In 2005, when Gromov and Mikhail Lesin, then an adviser to Putin, created Russia Today (now known as RT), Gromov insisted that Margarita Simonyan be the channel’s first editor-in-chief, according to a man who participated in the discussion. Gromov and Simonyan remain good friends, and Simonyan’s family has done well from the relationship. (Read more.) Lesin himself would later die under mysterious circumstances in a Washington DC area hotel after breaking with Putin.

Versi helped to launch the Muslim Council of Britain’s new dedicated centre for media monitoring after his success in campaigning for better representation of Muslims in the British media. He has repeatedly won substantial corrections from newspapers over their reporting of Islam.

“This is not about censorship, this is about transparency.”

Although the methodology has been vetted by external academics, the organisation admits that the classification of exactly what counts as an anti-Muslim story will ultimately be a subjective decision

There aren’t many things that Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn have in common, but here is one. Both were treated as joke candidates at the start of their campaigns. And joke candidates don’t face the same level of scrutiny as front-runners – which is a problem when they turn out to be serious contenders

Even once it was a straight fight between Trump and Hillary Clinton, too often she was treated like the next president and he was treated like the entertainment. There was a double standard of scrutiny.

With the EU referendum months and months away – and a win for Remain expected – Corbyn’s Euroscepticism seemed like a minor quirk, rather than a defining part of his politics. Journalists failed again to make the case for what really mattered.

the war of facts against narrative

“What happens in a hung parliament?” became one of the most searched-for terms in the UK. Hundreds of thousands of people were reading our piece at once. I was happy – it was a great article. I was also struck by something. As a specialist website, the New Statesman often struggles to compete with the huge newspaper websites on Google search results. Here, we had triumphed… because, it seemed, our rivals hadn’t written the piece.

I hope that my colleagues will continue their proud tradition of ignoring the herd – and therefore increasing their chances of being right

The seductive power of the conventional narrative is one of the most distorting forces in political journalism. Jeremy Corbyn is useless, Donald Trump is a joke, Theresa May is the Iron Lady, Remain will win, the Liberal Democrats are finished, Nigel Farage has retired from politics. All of these seem true, until – suddenly – they are not

One of my favourite sayings about journalism is this: “It’s not journalism’s job to report that people are saying it’s raining. It’s journalism’s job to look out of the window.” Too often, the words of a high-profile politician are repeated uncritically

the job of journalists is not to tell you what the Labour spokesman and “sources close to Michael Gove” are saying. It’s to evaluate their words and deliver them to readers or viewers in context. We need to look out of the window.

Tweet early, tweet often and don’t worry too much if you get something wrong, the thinking goes, because any attention is good.

Political journalism is often speculative, so there has to be latitude for predictions that prove incorrect. Sometimes that is taken as licence to write stories that are unfalsifiable, or will be correct – eventually

Among the journalists I spoke to, there was a general acceptance that some of their colleagues treated political journalism as entertainment. A story could be just that. At outlets such as the Financial Times and Bloomberg, which cater to a specialist audience who may make investment decisions based on their coverage, there are heavy sanctions for getting it wrong. Elsewhere, attitudes are more relaxed.

As humans, we find people more interesting than policies. But that has huge distorting effects. The best political journalists use people to tell their stories, reducing an abstract clash of ideas to a human scale. The worst ones treat existential questions as props for a Punch and Judy show

“All our stories are told through other people’s mouths,”

Journalists “create” public figures all the time. We decide which YouTuber to interview, which athlete to put on the front page, and which politicians are at the top of our mental Rolodex. We are, quite rightly, beginning to reckon with the lack of race, class and gender diversity in political journalism, and to expand our pool of sources. Why shouldn’t that apply on ideological grounds too?

Too often, I think, journalists identify one type of person with “true Britons”. We talk about Labour’s “heartlands” in working-class northern English regions, when the party is now strongest in multi-ethnic big cities. Asked to reflect on Labour’s loss of votes in the European elections, Richard Tice, chair of the Brexit Party, said: “This has happened because they haven’t listened to their core heartlands, they’ve listened to people in Islington.” But Labour has two Westminster seats in the Islington region, each with a thumping majority. So where is the party’s heartland now?

Because political journalists are stuck in the Commons and on Twitter – real world and digital versions of Versailles – they are prone to panic about not representing “real people”. But who gets depicted as the authentic voice of unheard Britain is governed by implicit assumptions that are grim when exposed to the light. Why are the views of a retired steelworker in Grimsby about “where the country has gone wrong” more important than those of a second-generation Nigerian-British nurse in Plaistow? Citizenship is supposed to transcend personal identity, and yet we still indulge an idea of the “volk”. This tendency applies equally in America, where retired steelworkers in Pennsylvania were held up as the Great Unheard, but the same epithet was not bestowed on black voters in Detroit.

Across Europe, the story of the latest EU elections was the rise of environmentalist parties. But somehow, their voters aren’t held up as “real people” whose real concerns must be heeded by the main parties. Why not?

There is excellent political journalism out there. And god, do we need it now more than ever. 

YouTube has inadvertently created a dangerous on-ramp to extremism by combining two things: a business model that rewards provocative videos with exposure and advertising dollars, and an algorithm that guides users down personalized paths meant to keep them glued to their screens

“If I’m YouTube and I want you to watch more, I’m always going to steer you toward Crazytown.”

94 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 use YouTube, a higher percentage than for any other online service

YouTube has been a godsend for hyper-partisans on all sides. It has allowed them to bypass traditional gatekeepers and broadcast their views to mainstream audiences, and has helped once-obscure commentators build lucrative media businesses

Many right-wing creators already made long video essays, or posted video versions of their podcasts. Their inflammatory messages were more engaging than milder fare. And now that they could earn money from their videos, they had a financial incentive to churn out as much material as possible.

The internet was an escape. Mr. Cain grew up in postindustrial Appalachia and was raised by his conservative Christian grandparents. He was smart, but shy and socially awkward, and he carved out an identity during high school as a countercultural punk. He went to community college, but dropped out after three semesters. Broke and depressed, he resolved to get his act together. He began looking for help in the same place he looked for everything: YouTube.

they rallied around issues like free speech and antifeminism, portraying themselves as truth-telling rebels doing battle against humorless “social justice warriors.” Their videos felt like episodes in a long-running soap opera, with a constant stream of new heroes and villains. To Mr. Cain, all of this felt like forbidden knowledge — as if, just by watching some YouTube videos, he had been let into an exclusive club. “When I found this stuff, I felt like I was chasing uncomfortable truths,” he told me. “I felt like it was giving me power and respect and authority.”

YouTube’s executives announced that the recommendation algorithm would give more weight to watch time, rather than views. That way, creators would be encouraged to make videos that users would finish, users would be more satisfied and YouTube would be able to show them more ads.

A month after its algorithm tweak, YouTube changed its rules to allow all video creators to run ads alongside their videos and earn a portion of the revenue they generated.

Bellingcat, an investigative news site, analyzed messages from far-right chat rooms and found that YouTube was cited as the most frequent cause of members’ “red-pilling” — an internet slang term for converting to far-right beliefs

Several current and former YouTube employees, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, said company leaders were obsessed with increasing engagement during those years. The executives, the people said, rarely considered whether the company’s algorithms were fueling the spread of extreme and hateful political content.

Google Brain’s researchers wondered if they could keep YouTube users engaged for longer by steering them into different parts of YouTube, rather than feeding their existing interests. And they began testing a new algorithm that incorporated a different type of A.I., called reinforcement learning. The new A.I., known as Reinforce, was a kind of long-term addiction machine. It was designed to maximize users’ engagement over time by predicting which recommendations would expand their tastes and get them to watch not just one more video but many more.

YouTube’s recommendations system is not set in stone. The company makes many small changes every year, and has already introduced a version of its algorithm that is switched on after major news events to promote videos from “authoritative sources” over conspiracy theories and partisan content. This past week, the company announced that it would expand that approach, so that a person who had watched a series of conspiracy theory videos would be nudged toward videos from more authoritative news sources. It also said that a January change to its algorithm to reduce the spread of so-called “borderline” videos had resulted in significantly less traffic to those videos.

the bulk of his media diet came from far-right channels. And after the election, he began exploring a part of YouTube with a darker, more radical group of creators. These people didn’t couch their racist and anti-Semitic views in sarcastic memes, and they didn’t speak in dog whistles. One channel run by Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, posted videos with titles like “‘Refugee’ Invasion Is European Suicide.” Others posted clips of interviews with white supremacists like Richard Spencer and David Duke.

As Mr. Molyneux promoted white nationalists, his YouTube channel kept growing. He now has more than 900,000 subscribers, and his videos have been watched nearly 300 million times. Last year, he and Ms. Southern — Mr. Cain’s “fashy bae” — went on a joint speaking tour in Australia and New Zealand, where they criticized Islam and discussed what they saw as the dangers of nonwhite immigration. In March, after a white nationalist gunman killed 50 Muslims in a pair of mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Mr. Molyneux and Ms. Southern distanced themselves from the violence, calling the killer a left-wing “eco-terrorist” and saying that linking the shooting to far-right speech was “utter insanity.” Neither Mr. Molyneux nor Ms. Southern replied to a request for comment. The day after my request, Mr. Molyneux uploaded a video titled “An Open Letter to Corporate Reporters,” in which he denied promoting hatred or violence and said labeling him an extremist was “just a way of slandering ideas without having to engage with the content of those ideas.”

Unlike most progressives Mr. Cain had seen take on the right, Mr. Bonnell and Ms. Wynn were funny and engaging. They spoke the native language of YouTube, and they didn’t get outraged by far-right ideas. Instead, they rolled their eyes at them, and made them seem shallow and unsophisticated.

“I noticed that right-wing people were taking these old-fashioned, knee-jerk, reactionary politics and packing them as edgy punk rock,” Ms. Wynn told me. “One of my goals was to take the excitement out of it.”

Ms. Wynn and Mr. Bonnell are part of a new group of YouTubers who are trying to build a counterweight to YouTube’s far-right flank. This group calls itself BreadTube, a reference to the left-wing anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s 1892 book, “The Conquest of Bread.” It also includes people like Oliver Thorn, a British philosopher who hosts the channel PhilosophyTube, where he posts videos about topics like transphobia, racism and Marxist economics.

The core of BreadTube’s strategy is a kind of algorithmic hijacking. By talking about many of the same topics that far-right creators do — and, in some cases, by responding directly to their videos — left-wing YouTubers are able to get their videos recommended to the same audience.

What is most surprising about Mr. Cain’s new life, on the surface, is how similar it feels to his old one. He still watches dozens of YouTube videos every day and hangs on the words of his favorite creators. It is still difficult, at times, to tell where the YouTube algorithm stops and his personality begins.

It’s possible that vulnerable young men like Mr. Cain will drift away from radical groups as they grow up and find stability elsewhere. It’s also possible that this kind of whiplash polarization is here to stay as political factions gain and lose traction online.

I’ve learned now that you can’t go to YouTube and think that you’re getting some kind of education, because you’re not.

German journalists proved to be significantly more rigid in their general ethical stance whereas their British colleagues felt freer to follow their own personal judgements

What we found was that – despite an eye-catchingly partisan press in Britain – the country’s journalists are not more determined than their German colleagues to set the political agenda or influence public opinion. But they do consider it significantly more important than German journalists to confront those in power and hold them to account.

journalists such as Amelia Gentleman, who unearthed the Windrush scandal, or Carole Cadwalladr, who doggedly investigated the role Cambridge Analytica played in the Brexit vote, appear to be more typical of what British journalists think they should do: scrutinising and standing up to those in power.

five of the seven libraries shut by East Sussex County Council last year, like Pevensey Bay, have yet to re-open, despite one county council chief boasting last July: “Six of the seven closed libraries have either already reopened or are reopening as community facilities”.

lower-level officials self-censor dealings with critics of the administration abroad

“The reality in which political decisions or presidential pettiness directs top U.S. diplomats’ choices over whose human rights work is mentioned in the public sphere and whose is not is a really scary reality.”

She often debunks misinformation spread online and comments on major news events related to propaganda and election interference, including Brexit and the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into links between the Russian government and Trump’s campaign. She has regularly tweeted criticism about Trump’s sharp political rhetoric and attacks on the press

After first being notified she would get the award, Aro filled out forms and questionnaires at the request of officials and cancelled paid speaking engagements to travel to Washington to attend the March 7 ceremony in Washington. The State Department also sent her an official invitation to accept the award and planned an itinerary for a corresponding tour of the United States, complete with flights and high-profile visits to newspapers and universities across the country.

In 2014, Aro pursued reporting on a Russian troll factory in St. Petersburg that aimed to alter western public opinions. Long before the U.S. elections in 2016, which propelled Russian disinformation campaigns to the spotlight, she unearthed evidence of a state-sanctioned propaganda machine trying to shape online discourse and spread disinformation. After she published her investigation, Russian nationalist websites and pro-Moscow outlets in Finland coordinated smear campaigns against her, accusing her at times of being a Western intelligence agent and drug dealer, and bombarding her with anonymous abusive messages. She also received death threats.

reserved the right to seek damages, due to Aro having to cancel paid speaking events

To DAU’s producers and editors, and some of its celebrity-artist guests, the project has become a vibrant creative and intellectual community, even a way of life. To anyone outside it, the project can seem unwelcoming

I’ve never encountered a project whose monumental, megalomaniacal ambitions are so dramatically at odds with the uneven final product. Although maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s all a big metaphor for the Soviet Union.

at turns maddening, boring, and pornographic

Khrzhanovsky moved to Kharkov, Ukraine, built a replica of a top-secret Soviet research facility, and commissioned about 400 people to live and work there for two years and reenact 30 years of Soviet history, from 1938 to 1968. The participants had to wear their period costumes even when the cameras weren’t rolling. More than 350,000 people auditioned. From 2009 to 2011, the director shot more than 700 hours of raw footage.

the set began to take on a life of its own, one that seemed to echo the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students were told to act as prison guards and got overzealous about the job. The DAU films had no script, only guided improvisation. The line between reality and fiction began dissolving. Offscreen and on, the participants fell in love, and more than a dozen babies were born.

The director cast Radmila Shchegoleva, the only professional actor in the core group, to play Dau’s wife, Kora. Before filming began, Khrzhanovsky had Shchegoleva spend a year preparing for the role, working in a chocolate factory and living in a communal apartment as Kora had done.

He was self-consciously making fun of his Soviet affectations, while also embracing them. He was pretending to be a sadist, but also just might be a sadist. He certainly seemed like a man with teenage fantasies about sex and control and way too big a budget.

From the outset, there have been complaints about the project’s working conditions. The writer Michael Idov visited the set in 2011 after hearing stories about the “survivalist camps” environment, and wrote a vivid, unsettling account in GQ. Some participants told Idov they thought their apartments had hidden cameras filming them at all times. Khrzhanovsky told me he’d installed the hidden cameras but never activated them and never forced anyone to do anything against his or her will. It was all a game, he said.

Filming ended in late 2011, when some neo-Nazis whom Khrzhanovsky invited from Moscow to spice up the narrative destroyed the film set, which the director had everyone refer to as “the Institute.” It was all captured in a DAU film that I’ve heard is engrossing. How could it not be? A Jewish director engaging with neo-Nazis. An artist turning the destruction of his own work into art, a not-so-subtle nod to Mikhail Bakunin, the 19th-century godfather of Russian anarchist thought. Perhaps it was the only way to end a film shoot that could have lasted forever.

Before entering the theaters you have to check your cellphone at the door. Instead of tickets, visitors are granted “visas” for six hours, 24 hours, or multiple-entry across the length of the run. I got an unlimited visa, which meant answering a psychometric questionnaire.

To help design a program that would create viewing itineraries based on people’s answers to the questionnaire, DAU’s producers spoke with Cambridge Analytica, the now-infamous British political-data firm that was hired by Donald Trump’s campaign for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and which Special Counsel Robert Mueller is now investigating for alleged misuse of the private data of Facebook’s 50 million users. But DAU’s executive producer, Martine d’Anglejan-Chatillon, told me they never hired the company. “They were just not very good,” she said. Instead, they hired Truth, a London-based agency that specializes in psychometric profiling.

a screen divided into 16 windows, exploring different plotlines and finding more information about the central characters—a project called DAU Digital that will soon go live online

The sex and manipulation didn’t seem to serve any greater artistic purpose, even if the participants had joined the project of their own free will. Also, if DAU isn’t scripted, were we seeing real drinking, real puking, and real sex?, I asked Khrzhanovsky. “Yes,” he said, they were having actual sex. So what kind of direction had he given the characters? What’s the difference between art and pornography? “You should answer me,” he said. I told him I wasn’t the creator. We went around in circles a bit. “It is sex, but I think it doesn’t matter if it’s with penetration or without penetration. What matters is what happens between people,” he said.Well, here I disagree. If there’s one line between art and pornography, it’s the line between simulated sex and real sex. Before filming, had he asked Natasha if she was comfortable having sex on camera? “When you invite people to this kind of project, generally you have all possible forces there and of course you discuss about sex, about arrest, about words you cannot pronounce,” Khrzhanovsky said. He said Natasha was Ukrainian, and not a sex worker, and that she and Bigé, her onscreen lover, continue to be part of the project. “Why do people try to be more moral than the people who participate? It’s a question about the question,” he told me.

an industrial soundscape composed by Brian Eno, who said at the press preview that DAU was “the most insanely ambitious project” he’d ever been involved in

In their meticulous period reconstructions, the films operate as a critique of the Soviet regime, but also exude a genuine nostalgia for it

I don’t think the DAU films start the slightest serious debate about #MeToo or anything related to it, except a debate about the director’s own attitudes toward women on and off the set. I kept thinking back to the Cognac-bottle scene. The only thing that seemed to distinguish that movie from pornography was the involvement of serious artists and scientists in other aspects of the project. Their reputations gave cover to something quite creepy. DAU is a cagey project that largely gets a pass because it poses as an artistic exploration of control, authoritarianism, and the exploitation of women, when what’s going on here might just be plain exploitation.

DAU in Paris is a massive Gesamtkunstwerk without much Kunst. It’s a nightclub disguised as an art installation. It’s a party—and it makes you feel as if you’re not invited. DAU is a case study in how word of mouth spreads among artists, and how the Paris cultural establishment will seemingly embrace any project that affirms its commitment to the avant-garde, no matter how grotesque or banal. The true work of art here may be that Khrzhanovsky managed to pull it off at all.

"transmission." This is the dominant view. It models communication as the movement of messages across space

In contrast to a transmission model, where messages are sent and information is delivered across space — physical or social space— Carey inscribes a "ritual" view. Here, the point of communication is not to "send a message," but to create a shared world in which we can dwell.

A good sermon reminds people of what they believe, draws them together in fellowship, creates community. This is the ritual view in action

even in a mostly "ritual" setting, some transmission may take place. And vice versa.

what fails to make sense as information may make sense as ritual.

the CNN panel o' pundits. Information-wise, there is almost nothing there for the intelligent viewer. No news, no revelations. Instead, an opportunity to identify — and share a belief system – with one or another speaker. Or to "hate watch," also a ritual

Do not under-estimate the power of ritual communication. We have many derisive names for it. Entertainment is one, "echo chamber" another. They are apt at times, but just as often the people who pride themselves on being information transmitters think their way is THE way.

It's harder than it looks to inform people. Delivering reliable information is not enough. You also have to deliver some sense of a shared world. News consumption is itself a ritual. The user of the news system learns what is new, but also affirms what always been true.

Whenever you cannot make sense of media as the transmission of information or "news," switch frames and ask if instead this makes sense as ritual.

After The Post sent inquiries to the company’s executives, the website for Twenty Lake Holdings was replaced with a page saying “Our website is under construction.” Company president Joseph E. Miller declined to comment.

Alden has moved more aggressively to make money off its real estate than competing media companies. For Alden, the Commercial Appeal’s building may not have been an afterthought but its main target.

While Gannett is resistant to Alden’s hostile bid for the company’s newspapers, Gannett has already sold at least six of its buildings — at least five of them within the past year — to Twenty Lake Holdings or an affiliate

Gannett sold Twenty Lake the headquarters of the Asheville Citizen-Times in North Carolina for $3.2 million. In a transaction the county recorded on the same day, Twenty Lake flipped the property to a local developer for $5.3 million

the newspaper industry, which lost 45 percent of newsroom positions between 2008 and 2017

The union that represents reporters at Digital First has tried to persuade Duke — to which his family has been a major donor — to remove Heath Freeman from the advisory board of the Freeman Center for Jewish Life because of his role in “weakening American news collection and disserving American democracy.”

At the dozen Digital First publications represented by the NewsGuild, the number of union jobs has declined nearly 70 percent, from 1,552 in 2012 to 487 in 2018. University of North Carolina researchers found, based on 12 newspapers, that Digital First has cut staff at a rate more than twice the national average during that time.

a pure liquidation strategy

After Alden acquires a newspaper, the team of companies it backs moves to monetize every square foot of its real estate.

In January, layoffs at BuzzFeed and HuffPost accentuated the difficulty of growing a digital news business. On Jan. 24, Gannett began laying off dozens more newsroom staffers around the country.

At the Delaware County Daily Times in Pennsylvania, the staff shrunk from 125 people to 25 in six years, said Bill Ross, executive director of the NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia. Digital First sold the paper’s old building for $2 million in 2016; reporters and editors now work out of a converted CVS and bicycle repair shop.

At several Digital First newspapers, employees now must work at home or from coffee shops, their brick-and-mortar newsrooms sold and replaced with the most profitable alternative: nothing.

“You’re going to take the profits that you reap as a result of cutting our staff and hurting the community that we serve, and you’re going to use it to buy stock in Fred’s pharmacy and then lose all that money?” Brandt said. “That’s what our purpose is? That’s what our sacrifice was for?”

journalists under-report incidents they consider minor, commonplace or part of the job, or where they fear reprisals.

most corruption reporting did not take place in the mainstream media, except in France, Germany and Scandinavia, where journalism had a better standing. Independent and non-profit media outlets were among the most vulnerable to financial pressures and the target of frequent threats, whether in terms of staff safety or lawsuits

Media concentration has become a growing issue for journalists across EU35, notably in Hungary.

The assassination of independent Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in a car bomb on 16 October 2017 marked a dark new trend emerging in the EU35: the murder of three investigative journalists in less than 12 months. Caruana Galizia’s death was followed by the murder of Slovakian journalist Ján Kuciak and his partner Martina Kušnírová on 26 February 2018, and the rape and murder of Bulgarian journalist Viktoria Marinova on 6 October 2018. Authorities say Marinova’s death is not connected to her being a journalist, a claim some colleagues have disputed.

“The Council of Europe study on self-censorship among journalists has shown that the main form of pressure is ‘psychological violence’, which is mainly visible by intimidation used by public authorities which has a clear chilling effects on media freedom. We are convinced that many investigative journalists are the target of this type of bullying,”

For journalists reporting on corruption, the threat of legal action is a very serious one, which impacts what one is able to write, particularly for investigative centres with limited resources

Official willingness to discredit and defame journalists is a Europe-wide phenomenon, but one that is especially acute for independent media outlets that specialise in investigative journalism into official corruption.

Even the cable news panels that purport to express opposing views are part of the damaging both-sides syndrome. A view from the left, a view from the right, and repeat. But take the average, and you’re right back in the comfortable, unilluminating middle.

Impartiality is still a value worth defending in mainstream news coverage. But you don’t get there by walking down the center line with a blindfold on.

they want to appear fair without taking any chances

Mostly, we have the irresistible pull to the center: centripetal journalism. It’s safe. It will never cause a consumer boycott. It feels fair without really being fair. And it’s boringly predictable. In the end, the media’s center-lane fixation puts us all to sleep. And that’s no way to drive a democracy.