When Nobody Trusts the Watchdog

The Quiet Assault on Journalism

Something rather strange is happening to journalism across Europe, and it is easy to miss because it doesn’t always look like an attack on journalism.

Sometimes it does, of course. A journalist is assaulted, a camera is damaged, someone is arrested, a reporter is threatened, or a newspaper office is attacked. Those are recognisable acts of intimidation, and most people instinctively understand why they matter. But much of the pressure now arrives in less dramatic forms. A journalist is publicly discredited. A source becomes harder to protect. Access is restricted. A lawsuit is threatened. Digital information is compromised. Political figures attack a reporter’s credibility, while online harassment becomes sufficiently routine that it is almost treated as part of the job.

None of these things necessarily produces a photograph that makes the front page. Taken individually, some can even be dismissed as the ordinary unpleasantness that comes with doing difficult work. Taken together, however, they begin to look rather different.

A new monitoring briefing from the Media Freedom Rapid Response has documented 736 press-freedom incidents affecting 1,174 journalists and other media professionals across Europe during the first six months of 2026. The figures cover the 27 EU member states and EU candidate countries, and include everything from verbal attacks and threats to physical assaults, obstruction, detention, legal pressure and attacks on journalists’ data.

That is a substantial number, but statistics have an unfortunate habit of becoming wallpaper. We look at 736 and think, That’s a lot, before moving on to whatever fresh political catastrophe has appeared on our phones that morning. The more interesting question is what those 736 incidents actually represent.

According to the monitoring, 212 incidents involved insult, harassment or discrediting, making this the most common category. There were also 155 threats and 126 incidents involving obstruction of journalistic activity. The report recorded 55 physical assaults, 47 cases involving arrest, detention or imprisonment, and 45 incidents involving journalists’ equipment.

In other words, much of the problem isn’t somebody kicking down the newsroom door. It is pressure, and pressure is much harder to photograph.

The problem with the word “attack”

We tend to imagine attacks on press freedom as something that happens somewhere else. It happens under dictatorships, during coups, or in countries where journalists disappear into prison cells, and governments simply decide what the population is allowed to know. Europe, naturally, considers itself rather more civilised than that, and broadly speaking it is.

That doesn’t mean European democracies are immune to the problem. It simply means that attempts to restrict journalism can take more sophisticated forms. A government doesn’t necessarily need to ban a newspaper when it can make access difficult. A politician doesn’t necessarily need to arrest a journalist when they can repeatedly describe that journalist as corrupt, dishonest, politically motivated or part of some supposed establishment conspiracy. A company doesn’t necessarily need to censor a story when it can threaten expensive legal action and make the journalist wonder whether publishing it is worth risking their home, livelihood or savings.

None of this requires a dramatic midnight knock at the door. Sometimes all that is required is enough friction.

That distinction matters because journalism depends upon something rather fragile… the willingness of people to keep asking awkward questions. If asking the awkward question becomes sufficiently expensive, exhausting or personally threatening, eventually fewer people ask it. Nobody has technically abolished press freedom. They’ve simply made using it increasingly uncomfortable.

And then there is the public

It would be easy to write an article portraying journalists as innocent heroes surrounded by wicked politicians, authoritarian governments and angry mobs. I don’t think reality is quite that tidy.

Journalism has a credibility problem. Traditional media organisations have made mistakes. They have published things that turned out to be wrong. They have occasionally followed political fashions, repeated claims without sufficient scrutiny, sensationalised stories and allowed editorial assumptions to creep into reporting. Some journalists have behaved badly, and some media organisations have behaved appallingly.

The public has noticed.

That matters because trust is part of the machinery that makes journalism work. If a newspaper tells me that something has happened, I don’t merely need to know that a journalist typed the words. I need some reason to believe that the information has been gathered honestly, checked properly and presented in good faith.

When that trust collapses, something rather unpleasant happens. A journalist can report something accurately, and half the audience will dismiss it because of who published it. Another outlet can report precisely the same fact, and the other half of the audience will dismiss that instead.

We end up with competing realities. Traditional media says, Trust us. Alternative media says, Don’t trust them. Social media says, Trust nobody. Meanwhile, the algorithm quietly sells advertising while we all argue.

It is difficult to imagine a better business model for confusion.

The political temptation

The MFRR figures contain another detail worth dwelling on. Across Europe, political actors were identified as the source of around 19 percent of recorded incidents, rising to approximately 25 percent within EU member states.

That does not mean politicians were responsible for a quarter of all attacks on journalists in some sinister centrally coordinated operation. The database records particular incidents and their identified sources, and the report itself cautions that its figures are not an exhaustive record of every violation.

But the number is still uncomfortable.

Politicians have always disliked journalists who ask inconvenient questions. That isn’t new. What has changed is the speed and scale at which political attacks can now travel.

A politician can criticise a journalist in a press conference or in Parliament, and that is part of democratic argument. But the same accusation can now be pushed simultaneously through social media, sympathetic commentators, partisan websites and thousands of individual accounts. A journalist who once had to deal with an angry politician may now have to deal with an entire online ecosystem.

The accusation doesn’t need to be particularly sophisticated, either. Bias, fake news, paid opposition, propaganda, establishment hack, far-right shill, far-left extremist… pick whichever label suits your particular tribe.

Once the label sticks, the reporting almost becomes irrelevant.

This is one of the more corrosive developments in modern political life because it allows people to reject information without actually examining it. We don’t have to demonstrate that the story is wrong. We only have to demonstrate that we dislike the person telling it.

The uncomfortable irony

There is a particularly awkward irony here. The people most concerned about censorship are often among the quickest to demand censorship when the information being published is something they dislike.

The political right complains about biased mainstream media while happily consuming partisan media. The political left complains about disinformation while sometimes treating uncomfortable information as inherently suspect. Governments defend press freedom until the press starts examining government. Media organisations defend scrutiny until somebody scrutinises the media organisation.

And ordinary people simply want somebody to tell them what is actually happening without turning every story into a tribal loyalty test.

That last bit may be the most important.

Press freedom isn’t really about protecting journalists. It is about protecting the public’s ability to know what powerful people are doing. Journalists are simply one of the mechanisms through which that information gets out.

If the mechanism becomes compromised, we all lose something.

The digital problem nobody quite knows how to solve

There is another aspect of the MFRR report that deserves more attention than it tends to receive… journalistic data and anonymous sources are increasingly at risk, particularly online.

This is where the story becomes much larger than journalists.

Modern journalism leaves an enormous digital footprint. Emails, messages, documents, location information, cloud storage, contact lists, photographs, metadata and source communications can all potentially form part of an investigative trail.

The old image of the journalist meeting a confidential source in a dark car park has become almost quaint. Today the source may communicate through a smartphone, upload documents to a cloud service and leave a digital trail without realising it. The journalist may think they are protecting the source. The technology may disagree.

That matters because anonymous sources are sometimes essential to exposing wrongdoing. Whistleblowers do not generally approach journalists because they have nothing to lose. They approach them precisely because they have something to lose.

If people become convinced that confidential communication is no longer genuinely confidential, fewer people will provide information. Once again, nobody needs to formally ban journalism. The information simply stops arriving.

There is another problem… concentration

The MFRR’s country findings also reveal something broader about the environment in which journalists operate. Its mission to France identified concerns around increasing media concentration, pressure on public-service media, abusive lawsuits, safety during protests and weak legal protection for sources. In Italy, the organisation reported concerns around political interference involving public broadcasting alongside governance and funding issues. In Serbia, it described continuing violence and intimidation involving media professionals and a culture of impunity.

These are different countries with different political cultures. They shouldn’t be lumped together as though Europe is one enormous authoritarian state in waiting.

There is nevertheless a common thread worth examining: who controls the conditions under which information is produced?

That question becomes increasingly important as traditional newsrooms shrink, media ownership becomes concentrated, public broadcasters come under political pressure and independent journalists struggle with legal and financial risks.

Freedom of the press is not simply the absence of censorship. It also requires the practical ability to operate independently. A theoretically free journalist who cannot afford a lawyer, cannot protect a source and cannot obtain access to information is not necessarily very free in practical terms.

And then came the internet…

The internet was supposed to democratise information. In many respects, it did.

A person sitting in a small flat in Hull, a village in Spain or a farmhouse in Serbia can now publish an investigation that potentially reaches millions of people. That is extraordinary.

It also created the greatest information mess in human history.

We have more access to information than any generation before us and, simultaneously, less certainty about which information deserves our trust. The gatekeepers have been weakened, but nobody quite worked out what would replace them.

The old system had editors, fact-checkers, legal departments, professional standards and established processes. It also had plenty of flaws.

The new system has algorithms.

Which is rather like replacing the librarian with a caffeinated pigeon and then wondering why the reference section has become chaotic.

The algorithm isn’t particularly interested in whether something is true. It is interested in whether people react to it. Anger performs. Fear performs. Outrage performs. Nuance tends to sit quietly in the corner drinking tea.

And so the most inflammatory interpretation of a story can become more visible than the most accurate one.

So who watches the watchdog?

This is where the discussion needs to become uncomfortable.

We absolutely should defend journalists from intimidation, violence, political interference and illegitimate legal pressure. But we should also expect journalists to behave responsibly.

Those two principles are not contradictory. In fact, they depend upon one another.

A free press needs independence. Independence requires public trust. Public trust requires professional standards. Professional standards require scrutiny, and scrutiny includes scrutiny of journalists themselves.

The answer to bad journalism cannot be censorship. It cannot be political control, and it cannot be harassment. But neither can it simply be “journalists are never wrong.”

That isn’t freedom. That’s another form of tribalism.

The healthier position is considerably more boring. We should be able to criticise journalism without threatening journalists. We should be able to challenge a story without attempting to silence the person who wrote it. We should be able to demand corrections without demanding obedience.

And journalists should be able to investigate governments, corporations, institutions and each other without wondering whether asking the question will put them in physical or financial danger.

That sounds remarkably ordinary.

Perhaps that’s why it is so difficult.

The number that should bother us

The figure that stays with me isn’t actually 736. It is 1,174 people.

Behind every incident is somebody trying to gather information, photograph something, ask a question, protect a source, publish something uncomfortable or simply do their job.

Some will have made mistakes. Some will have written things I disagree with. Some will have been biased. Some will probably have been thoroughly irritating.

Welcome to humanity.

None of that means they should be threatened, assaulted, obstructed or intimidated into silence.

Because eventually this stops being about journalists.

It becomes about what happens when ordinary citizens no longer have reliable mechanisms for finding out what people in positions of power are doing.

That is the real danger.

A society doesn’t suddenly wake up one morning without a free press. It can happen much more quietly. People lose trust. Journalists become targets. Sources become frightened. Newsrooms become financially weaker. Legal pressure increases. Political hostility becomes normal. Digital surveillance becomes easier. Audiences retreat into ideological tribes, and eventually everyone has their own version of reality.

At that point, freedom of the press may still exist on paper. The journalists may still technically be allowed to write, and the newspapers may still technically be allowed to publish. But if nobody trusts anyone, nobody listens.

Perhaps that is the quietest way to silence a press of all.

Not by shutting down the printing presses, but by convincing everybody that there is no point reading what comes out of them.

Until Next Time