“Populist governments consider the public media as prey, but the moment they touch it, the value of that prey diminishes,” RSF’s Szalai says, noting that this ultimately undermines the population’s right to information and leads to lower public trust in mainstream media. “The level of independence of Slovak public media has always been lower than that in the Czech Republic.”
Yet even in Czechia, where trusted public media and robust journalistic independence have long been described as an exception among more illiberal neighbours, new threats are looming.
Signed in November as post-election coalition talks continued, the draft coalition agreement between Andrej Babis’s ANO, the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) party and the conservative Motorists for Themselves stipulates plans to scrap the licence fees for Czech Television (Česká televise) and Czech Radio (Český rozhlas), and introduce additional obligations and restrictions for NGOs receiving funding from abroad.
The two measures, according to watchdogs, risk “undermining the independence of public service media” by creating uncertainty about its funding, and could open the door to “political attacks on private-sector and Prague-based exiled media outlets.”
Ranked 10th in RSF’s World Press Freedom Index, the Czech Republic nevertheless “should now be considered at risk” because of the incoming government’s stance, warns Szalai.
During his first stint as prime minister from 2017 to 2021, Babis already had the Czech public service media in his sights, envisioning scrapping licence fees for pensioners and low-income households, and scheming to appoint friendly nominees to its governing council. His election defeat five years ago by a liberal-democratic coalition that vowed to strengthen the public media and support the independent press against today’s challenges was welcomed by those who worried about the future of media pluralism in Czechia.
But amid shifting priorities, internal divisions and powerful business interests, the ambitious agenda of the coalition was quickly downgraded and Fiala’s government only managed to raise – after over 15 years of being frozen – the monthly licence fees by 15 Czech crowns to 150 crowns (about 6 euros) for Czech Television and for Czech Radio by 10 crowns to 55 crowns per month (about 2.20 euros).
Yet even this watered-down success is now at risk as Babis and his coalition partners rail against a public service media they accuse – not unlike what has been heard in Slovakia or Hungary – of being wasteful, non-transparent and liberally biased in their coverage.
“For ANO, the approach is both tactical, in that they feel Czech Television and Czech Radio are biased against them; and populist, because many of their electorate, who are from lower down on the economic scale, don’t like paying the licence fee,” Martina Urbanikova, a media expert and assistant professor at Masaryk University in Brno, previously told BIRN.
While RSF’s Szalai admits that it is the “legitimate right” of the incoming coalition to change the funding mechanisms of public media, the lack of a viable alternative is sparking concerns that the planned moves to finance them directly from the state budget is “just a means for political control”.
Emboldened by his landslide election victory in October and dependent on more extremist coalition partners, Babis may prove more assertive than during his first term in moving against media outlets and structures he regards as a threat, experts have warned.
Even without the licence fees, Szalai adds, there are ways to ensure that their funding can be “adequate, foreseeable and sustainable” in accordance with the new European Media Freedom Act, a set of new EU-wides rules aimed at ensuring the independent functioning of public service media, protecting editorial independence and journalistic sources, and strengthening the transparency of media ownership across the bloc.
Those measures, according to Szalai, could include creating a multi-annual plan, creating institutional safeguards, and establishing an independent body to evaluate the level of funding and needs of public media over the long term.