European Commission Vice President Věra Jourová has high expectations for the first-of-a-kind EU media rulebook, which cleared a key vote in Parliament on Tuesday.
“The European Media Freedom Act will be a major warning signal for member states,” she told POLITICO in an interview in Strasbourg.
The new regulation, which aims to secure media independence against political pressure and foster pluralism across the bloc, could well turn into a thorn in the side of the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán, whose Fidesz party has seized de facto control of 80 percent of the country’s media through “political and economic” maneuvers according to Reporters without Borders’ latest World Press Freedom index.
“We cannot unscramble the scrambled eggs,” in Hungary, Jourová said — a country “where everything and everybody is dependent on one party,” where “there is no public media but state media” and where “the difference between supporting a media economically in a transparent way and a corrupted media in a hidden way is big.”
But the upcoming set of new rules could eventually make a difference, with its new transparency and independence obligations and the increased scrutiny to which it subjects detrimental media conglomerates and laws affecting the EU’s media landscape.
“The whole tendency in Hungary, which leads to monopolization of information, is something we don’t want to happen everywhere else,” Jourová said, adding that “over time, we might try to, step by step, dismantle such systems.”
But it could come at a big cost if Budapest were not to play the game, she stressed, hinting at the law’s infringement procedures.
“They might be high penalties at the end of the day,” she said.
But it’s not just Hungary. France could soon land in the Commission’s crosshairs too. French law enforcement recently detained journalist Ariane Lavrilleux after she reported on leaked, compromising documents.
“The French case shows there is a very weak protection” of journalists, Jourová said, outlining that France was among the countries arguing at first that the media law was “destroying” their “fantastic systems.”
“I always found this very, very arrogant,” she added.
Paris previously pleaded — successfully — in the Council for a bigger carve-out in the media law allowing EU capitals to snoop on reporters, while European lawmakers in their version of the legislation went with stricter exemptions and stronger safeguards to protect journalists.
Members of the Parliament, after Tuesday’s smooth approval of their position in the plenary, will now kick off political discussions with the Council on October 18.
There will be “demanding negotiations,” Jourová acknowledged.
