European Media Freedom Act: a project for administrative regulation of the European press
A real regression in terms of press freedom
Original article : https://www.epochtimes.fr/european-media-freedom-act-un-projet-de-regulation-administrative-de-la-presse-europeenne-2556316.html
Widespread media labeling is at the heart of new EU media freedom legislation
BY LUDOVIC GENIN for The Epoch Times, March 1, 2024 5:44 p.m.
An essential text for the future of European democracy is currently being discussed in Brussels. The European Media Freedom Act or “media freedom legislation” aims to create a European framework for press freedom and the independence of information on the basis of principles and practices directly applicable to the 27 countries of the Union.
According to a forum bringing together more than 550 French titles and press groups, the text was prepared without taking into account national situations and without consultation with the media, and risks "leading to the opposite result to that sought and marking a real regression in terms of freedom.
This first European media legislation will rely on the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI), a measure of media reliability created by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) combined with the algorithmic power of social media and search engines to label all European media.
After an agreement in December, the legislative text must be approved in March by the European Parliament then by the Council of the European Union for application within 6 months.
The first European media regulation bill
The European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) is the first European media legislation about to be generalized throughout Europe. Called the “EU Media Freedom Legislation,” the EMFA proposes a new set of rules aimed at “promoting media pluralism and independence across the EU” according to the proposed law .
Among the measures, mechanisms to protect editorial independence, stable financing of public service media – deemed pluralist and impartial (Article 5), transparency in terms of media ownership and concentration and even protection against interference political and economic.
However, there are more coercive measures such as the implementation of a "media ownership monitoring system aimed at establishing a database by country", the creation of the 'European Committee for Media Services' - a new entity for monitoring and regulating European media (Article 8), and the establishment of an instrument for monitoring media pluralism.
Future European legislation in fact enshrines the use of the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI) , developed by RSF, as a reference for identifying reliable media – opening the door to generalized labeling of the press at European level, relying on the power algorithmic of GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft).
The text of the agreement, validated in December 2023, should be adopted by April 2024. The European Media Services Committee should take office three months later and all other provisions the following three months.
A “real regression in terms of press freedom”
In a column published in June 2023 , the General Information Press Alliance, the FNPS and the SEPM believe that the EMFA could mark a “real regression in terms of press freedom”. According to the collective bringing together more than 550 group titles and French daily, weekly or magazine press, "the temptation to establish an administrative regulation of pluralism on the audiovisual model is a regression in relation to the freedom which the written press enjoys today in France. »
At first glance, journalists will be protected from political or economic interference, but in fact, the EMFA could “encourage press censorship by platforms and compromise the independence of journalists” declares the Alliance Presse union.
“Is administrative regulation better placed than the community of citizens and readers to judge the level of pluralism necessary for our country? » asks the text. “The way in which each country enforces press freedom and pluralism depends on its history, its political tradition, and its level of protection of freedoms. »
In France, the 1881 law on freedom of the press is eminently protective because it establishes a principle of freedom of publication, which only the judiciary can censor or limit in certain cases.
According to the signatory publishers, the European Media Freedom Act will give the power to censor publications to GAFAM through the application of centralized and generalized labeling of information.
Media labeling at the heart of the European Media Freedom Act
In the provisional text on which the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union have agreed, we find the application of the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI) mentioned in article 17 and consideration 33: “Providers of very major online platforms should provide functionality allowing media service providers to declare that they meet certain requirements. To this end “providers of very large online platforms may rely […] on the machine-readable standard developed by the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI) or other codes of conduct relevant. »
We talked about the labeling of media and information as a probable outcome of the States General of Information (EGI) in France, in a previous article . The Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI) is also proposed by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) to ensure global labeling of French media. The recent controversy surrounding RSF's referral to the Council of State against the Cnews news channel called into question the impartiality of RSF's director general, Christophe Deloire, also director of EGI.
Since 2018, RSF has been imagining a media labeling system through the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI), a certification tool based on 130 reliability indicators and which would determine the visibility of a media outlet in search engines and on the media. social, with advertisers but also its eligibility to receive subsidies or donations, we can read on the RSF website .
The JTI label was integrated in 2022 into the European Commission's Code of Good Practice on Disinformation. It is defined there as a “reference for promoting reliable sources of information and combating disinformation”. The text in question is one of the codes of conduct recommended by the Digital Services Act ( DSA ), the new regulation governing large digital platforms in Europe, applied since the summer of 2023. The DSA then allowed the broader development of the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) which should apply to all European media, after having imposed binding legislation on the platforms.
An investigation published by the Epoch Times explained that the large-scale application of media labeling, such as that of the American company Newsguard, had resulted in a biased ideological coverage of the media. The survey revealed that the American start-up gives good marks – that is to say visibility on social media and search engines, access to advertisers, etc. – to media located on the side of the political-media doxa of the left or progressive, while bad marks are given to conservative and independent media, even if they adhere to high journalistic standards.
The specifications of RSF's JTI are also very close to those of NewsGuard , which is not surprising when we learn that RSF has been collaborating with NewsGuard since May 2023 to certify the news media in Ukraine .
In the end, a media outlet will have to show its “paw board” as Thibaut Bruttin , deputy to the director general of RSF, said, if it does not want to be deprived of its visibility and freedom of expression. As Orwell predicted, media freedom will mean censorship.
A major democratic issue
The freedom of expression that our laws protect in France risks being swept away by this European law labeling the media according to standards given by “analysts” from JTI or NewsGuard using the algorithmic power of search engines and social media. to implement them.
Considered one of the fundamental principles of democratic regimes, freedom of the press is threatened even though it is enshrined in numerous French legal texts, including article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, the Freedom of the Press Act of 1881 and the Freedom of Communication Act of 1986 .
“Each time a democracy is established, it has been accompanied by a development of the media. Conversely, non-democratic societies are almost systematically characterized by control and restriction of the media,” says historian Isabelle Veyrat-Masson.
Censorship of a media which was today the exception in France will become the rule tomorrow if the EMFA is promulgated. No contradictory exchange, no way to appeal to the courts, the media will be under a regime of censorship and self-censorship and will have to pass through the caudine forks of ideological labeling and the algorithmic power of the biggest social media platforms and search engines in the world – none of which are European.