By Rayhan Jasin
In many European countries, the independence of public service media rises and falls with the political tide. All too often, a new government doesn’t just take power—it takes the newsroom. One of the first moves after an election victory is to pack public broadcasters’ governing bodies with political loyalists, turning watchdogs into lapdogs. Yet, in a few rare cases, new administrations have tried to reverse course, seeking to depoliticize state-controlled media after years of editorial capture.
This article examines five public media systems—Spain, Greece, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Poland—that have recently changed their State Media Monitor (SMM) classification. Drawing on SMM data and additional journalistic sources, it asks: Is there a pattern in how left- and right-wing governments treat public media? Do liberal parties uphold press freedom, while populists dismantle it, or are all parties equally tempted to turn public broadcasters into mouthpieces?
The Troubled Cases
Spain: A tug-of-war for the mic
Spain offers a textbook case of how public media can become a pawn in partisan power struggles. Although governed by the center-left PSOE under Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s national broadcaster RTVE has faced allegations of political meddling not only from opposition parties, but also from within.
The political heat turned up following Sánchez’s re-election in 2023, when six of RTVE’s ten board members had ties to the ruling PSOE–Podemos coalition. Just a year into his tenure, board president José Manuel Pérez Tornero resigned, publicly citing government overreach. His replacement, Elena Sánchez, didn’t last long either—ousted in March 2024 for resisting political pressure over programming decisions, including a controversial late-night show accused of promoting sensationalism.
After the shake-up, RTVE’s interim leadership approved the show, and by October, the government amended Spain’s public broadcasting law to lower the threshold for board appointments—from a two-thirds supermajority to a simple parliamentary majority. Critics called the move a legislative bulldozer designed to steamroll dissent and cement control. Unsurprisingly, SMM has ranked RTVE as “State Controlled” since 2022, citing both budgetary dependence and governmental dominance in management decisions.
However, PSOE’s rivals are hardly innocent. When the conservative Partido Popular (PP) and the far-right Vox party took power in various regions following the 2023 local elections, they wasted no time in following the same playbook. From Aragon to Madrid, newly empowered regional governments began reshaping public broadcasters, sidelining critical journalists, and rewriting media laws to lower the bar for appointing loyalists.
Madrid’s public broadcaster RTVM, for instance, was targeted by a legal amendment that scrapped the two-thirds majority requirement for board appointments—mirroring the national PSOE strategy, but this time deployed by PP leader Isabel Díaz Ayuso. Elsewhere, regional media such as Canary Islands’ RTVC and Aragon’s CARTV faced newsroom pressure to soften critical coverage of conservative administrations.
Even in regions without a clear electoral link, editorial interference remained rife. Catalonia’s CCMA faced accusations of pro-separatist bias under the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC)-led government, leading to an exodus of disillusioned journalists. In Ceuta, RTVCE’s leadership was reshuffled following pressure from left-leaning local actors, despite their limited parliamentary power.
In response to this wave of political meddling, the SMM downgraded these five regional broadcasters—RTVC, CARTV, RTVM, CCMA and RTVCE—from Independent State-Funded Media to State Controlled status, citing growing editorial interference and politicization of leadership.
Greece: Independence lost at the stroke of a pen
In Greece, public media independence didn’t erode overnight—it was signed away. Following his 2019 election victory, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of the center-right New Democracy (ND) party issued a decree placing the country’s largest news agency, ANA-MPA, directly under his office’s jurisdiction.
By 2021, Mitsotakis had further tightened his grip, reforming the ANA-MPA board to include two additional members appointed exclusively by the ruling party. What was once an independent news platform gradually morphed into a megaphone for government messaging. A 2024 International Press Institute (IPI) report singled out ANA-MPA as a cautionary tale—an agency repurposed to steer public discourse in favor of the government line.
The 2024 edition of the State Media Monitor followed suit, downgrading ANA-MPA from an Independent State-Funded Media outlet to a State Controlled news organization. In this case, media capture wasn’t about loud confrontations or mass firings—it was about quiet institutional redesigns that made critical reporting increasingly untenable.
Slovakia: From license fees to lockdown
Slovakia’s public broadcaster experienced perhaps the most aggressive capture in Europe last year, with democratic norms sidelined in broad daylight.
Once funded in part by public license fees, RTVS had long enjoyed a degree of editorial autonomy. That changed in July 2023, when Slovakia’s parliament—still under pressure from the right-wing opposition—abolished the license fee model. The new funding mechanism tethered RTVS to a fixed percentage of the national GDP, effectively handing the purse strings to the government. The result? A dramatic €55 million budget cut that left the broadcaster limping.
Things went from bad to worse when populist strongman Robert Fico returned to power in October 2023. Within months, Fico’s coalition abolished RTVS entirely and replaced it with a new entity: STVR. The move allowed the government to install an entirely new management and governance structure. Political loyalists, many with ties to the nationalist Slovak National Party (SNS), were handed the reins. SNS leader Andrej Danko openly called for a “state television”—not a public broadcaster. Under the new order, financial independence is a relic of the past: public contributions were scrapped, and all funding now flows directly from the state, subject to the whims of politicians. These overt interventions in RTVS led to its reclassification in 2024 from the Captured Public Media (CaPu) category to the State-Controlled (SC) Media class.
The Turnarounds: When Politics Brought Freedom
Yet not all political interventions spell doom. In rare but notable instances, incoming governments have acted to restore rather than restrict editorial independence.
Poland: Undoing the damage
In Poland, the liberal Civic Platform (PO), led by Donald Tusk, returned to power in 2023 after years of populist rule under the right-wing Law and Justice Party (PiS). One of the PO’s first moves was to begin disentangling the state from Polska Press—the country’s largest media publisher, controversially acquired in 2020 by state-run oil giant PKN Orlen under PiS orders.
Tusk’s new government pledged to sell off Polska Press, a step seen as critical to restoring editorial independence and reversing the PiS-era campaign of “re-Polonizing” the media. In recognition of these reforms, the 2024 State Media Monitor reclassified Polska Press from Captured Public Media to Independent State Media.
More changes may follow at the national broadcaster TVP, long accused of toeing the PiS line. Under the United Right regimes of Beata Szydło and Mateusz Morawiecki, TVP became synonymous with government propaganda. But after the 2023 elections, the new PO-led parliament passed a resolution to overhaul public service media, promising an end to political messaging. In a symbolic move, officials vowed to replace “paintings”—a euphemism for propaganda—with “photography,” a metaphor for reality-based journalism, according to a 2025 report on media capture in Poland. Though the transition has been rocky, the intent is clear: to put journalism, not politics, back in the anchor’s chair.
Slovenia: A green wave cleans house
In Slovenia, too, voters signaled that they’d had enough. The 2022 general election delivered a decisive win to the liberal Green Party under Robert Golob, sweeping away Janez Janša’s right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), which had drawn fire for its authoritarian tendencies and close ties with Hungarian media oligarchs.
Golob began immediately to revamp Slovenia’s media landscape. Key changes included reforms to the law governing the national broadcaster RTV Slovenija (RTVLO), empowering civil society to play a greater role in board appointments. The state-owned telecom company Telekom Slovenije also scrapped plans—originally backed by the SDS—to sell its media arm, SioINET, to Hungarian business interests. Instead, the government appointed a new editor-in-chief credited with restoring editorial balance.
Elsewhere, Slovenia’s news agency STA gained a financial lifeline without politically motivated performance hurdles. A new bill ensured that public funds would be available if commercial revenues fell short, protecting STA from being weaponized through funding threats.
These actions paid off. By 2024, the State Media Monitor had reclassified RTVLO as Independent Public media, while STA and SioINET were upgraded to Independent State-Funded Media and Independent State Media, respectively—a clean sweep for Slovenia’s liberal government in the battle for media freedom.
No party has a monopoly on press freedom
In Europe, public media often double as political battlefields. From editorial reshuffles to legislative overhauls, the toolkit of media capture is vast—and bipartisan. While right-wing populists like Fico and Janša have been more brazen in their efforts to dominate the airwaves, left-leaning parties are not immune to temptation. Spain’s PSOE has also been accused of stacking RTVE with allies and changing laws to secure control.
What emerges is not a partisan divide, but a structural vulnerability. Public media are often financially and institutionally tied to the very governments they are meant to hold to account.
If independence is to be more than a talking point, reform must go deeper. That means delinking public funding from political favor, diversifying board appointments—perhaps by involving NGOs or academia—and enshrining editorial autonomy in law. Without such safeguards, journalists will remain in the crosshairs, and the public—who ultimately fund these outlets—will continue to pay the price.
Photo by Brian Wertheim on Unsplash (MJRC uses Unsplash+).