Opening remarks

Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton

In his opening remarks, Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton summed up the challenges in the current media landscape and set out the Commission’s agenda for addressing them. He highlighted the growing gap between online audiences and traditional media, with falling revenues for the latter and the need for media to find new models to monetise their revenue. Healthy revenues are needed to protect jobs. Job cuts reduce the capacity to produce quality content and to nurture democracy. New revenue models, particularly for online media, include membership and subscription models, the use of smart paywalls and donations or one-off payments. Other innovations include publishers joining forces to test common online advertising platforms to retain both revenues and data.

The threats to quality journalism and democracy also come from government interference (including channelling state advertising budgets to politically favoured media), politicisation of public media, or a heavy concentration of media ownership in a few hands. Media consolidation, which strengthens the financially vulnerable, can be good for business resilience, but it can also be a threat to editorial independence, particularly if the media owner has vested interests in other sectors and journalists therefore do not feel fully free to report on these. Redundancies to exploit post-consolidation synergies are another threat to a plurality of views. Pluralism also cannot reach its full potential because there are still barriers in the internal market to operating across EU borders. Rules differ, may not be clear or be applied arbitrarily. Overall, media independence and pluralism are at stake, together with the quality of public debate and public accountability. Yet, the pandemic has increased the appetite for quality information from TV or established newspapers; trust in traditional news sources has risen. The Commission needs to respond by ensuring that citizens can access reliable, quality and independent information, including online. It will present a Media Freedom Act in 2022. Its objectives will be to ensure the integrity and independence of the EU media market, and thus boost media pluralism, improve the sector’s resilience, act on unjustified interference in media companies’ activities, ensure media pluralism is safeguarded (in traditional and online media) and make the European information space more secure. The Act will build on the revised Audiovisual Media Services Directive and complement the Digital Services Act package. The result will be a comprehensive media policy for the digital age. Commissioner Breton concluded by acknowledging that with the European Media Freedom Act, the Commission will walk a fine line; one it wants to walk together with industry, civil society, the Member States and their regulatory authorities, starting with a public consultation as the first step. Commissioner Breton concluded by stressing that the Commission can provide the regulatory framework and a level playing field, but it is up to industry to innovate to achieve financial – and therefore editorial – independence as they complete the digital transition. It is for Europe’s media outlets and professionals to develop the formats that work and join together to offer citizens across the Union quality and reliable information. For its part, the Commission is working with the European Investment Fund, private investors and foundations to test new models of financial support. It is also rolling out a media data space and a

virtual reality coalition to foster collaboration and innovation, and will continue to support newsrooms that collaborate on data and training and enter into value-adding partnerships. One such partnership announced at the Forum is the creation of a European Newsroom of 16 national press agencies in reporting on EU affairs from Brussels.

Dace Melbārde, Member of the European Parliament

Ms Melbārde welcomed the wide range of media represented at the Forum from a wide range of national backgrounds, from those countries ranking highest among the world in freedom of speech and those facing economic and political pressure in their home space. She saw the Forum as a great illustration of the diversity and strength of the media industry. Pointing out that the media ecosystem was fragile even before the Covid-19 epidemic because there had been a deterioration in media freedom and economic viability over the previous ten years, she highlighted risks posed to media pluralism. The pandemic has deepened existing problems and created new ones.

The European Parliament sees the Commission Media and Audiovisual Action Plan published in 2020 as a “really good starting point,” but stressed the need for the Commission to go further to help the news media sector recover more quickly from the pandemic and implement the green and digital transitions, building on the European Parliament report on Europe’s Media in the Digital Decade: an Action Plan to Support Recovery and Transformation adopted on 20 October 2021, for which she was rapporteur. Ms Melbārde further highlighted the following key points of the report: the Commission should develop a strategy for the news media industry, there should be greater financial support for news media at EU and Member State level; there should be increased financial support from the Cohesion funds, Horizon Europe and Digital Europe; Member States should support news media organisation through their national recovery plans; and there should be a media-friendly tax policy. She welcomed the fact that the cross-sectoral strand of the Creative Europe programme is open to news media under this Multiannual Financial Framework for the first time, but the Parliament is calling for an improvement in the amount of support available given the range of challenges news media face and for a dedicated news media fund under the 2021-2027 Multiannual Financial Framework.

She stressed that any provision for public funding should guarantee full editorial freedom. She also stressed the importance of a level playing field for traditional news media facing competition from new platforms. This requires legislation on transparency in the functioning of operating systems and in advertising. In addition, she recalled that the global digital platforms need to pay their fair share in taxes. Part of that tax revenue should be returned to the bloodstream of the news media industry. Investing tax revenue back into the ecosystem is only fair since the media are facing a disproportionate economic impact from the global online platforms, mainly non-European players who do not invest in the EU media ecosystem. Smaller markets, small countries, local regions and culture face additional challenges: these markets are too small to operate economically viable businesses on market principles. Some Member States, like the Baltic states, suffer from geopolitical interference in their media space, including in the form of investment. Economic sustainability is a prerequisite for freedom of expression, so we must do what we can jointly.