Malta slips to 'high-risk' in media freedom report, second behind Hungary

Malta has slipped into being rated as “high-risk” in a recent assessment of media pluralism and media freedom across Europe, joining Hungary.

This year’s edition of the Media Pluralism Monitor saw Malta’s overall risk score worsen by five percentage points, to 71%, just second behind worst-performing Hungary (75%).

The report from the EU-funded Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom (CMPF) attributed the decline to “a lack of transparency of media ownership and increased commercial pressure on editorial independence”.

Malta was rated as being at very high risk in the protection of the right to information – such as freedom of information requests – political independence of the media, editorial autonomy and transparency of media ownership.

Areas of high risk included integrity of political information during elections and the independence and effectiveness of national regulators.

Malta and Hungary were the “worst performing” EU member states in election information integrity – assessing the frameworks in place to ensure that political candidates and their views are represented fairly, and how political advertising is monitored across public service social media, private media outlets and online platforms during elections.

The report attributed Malta’s deteriorating access to information to “repeated Freedom of Information request denials”, with the publication highlighting the government’s refusal to provide Times of Malta with information about ministers’ asset declarations for last year.

“This prompted the government to formally propose, in 2026, the abolition of the submission of ministers’ asset declarations and the removal of obligations for MPs to declare properties solely owned by their spouses”, the report noted.

Turning to political interference in the media, the report said “strong direct and/or indirect political control” via ownership of media outlets persisted in Malta.

Meanwhile, bodies tasked with oversight of the sector “often lack either adequate enforcement powers or sufficient resources to effectively address complaints”, it said, describing Malta as being at “particularly high risk” in this regard.

While Malta, alongside the Czech Republic, is in the process of adopting new national rules on media ownership transparency, it “still has frameworks in place that lag behind the newly established EU media ownership transparency framework”.

And alongside nine other countries, Malta did “worryingly little to address the threat of disinformation”, while actions to tackle manipulation of information by foreign actors were lacking.

The report highlighted an incident in June last year where cross-border journalism outlet Investigate Europe reported being targeted by “at least 50 bogus copyright claims” aimed at removing articles about investigations into Europe’s betting industry from Google results.

The incident, which affected Malta’s Amphora Media outlet, mirrors a similar incident the preceding year, when Times of Malta reported on an apparent attempt to suppress articles about alleged fraudster and former Vitals CEO Ram Tumuluri.

The report grouped various areas of examination into four main sections.

Malta was rated as being at “medium-high risk” for “fundamental protection”, behind Hungary, covering the safeguards needed to guarantee media freedom and pluralism.

It scored fourth, but was “very high risk” in media plurality, behind Cyprus, Romania and Hungary, and ranked second behind Hungary for political independence, where it was rated “high risk”.

In “social inclusiveness”, which covers universal access to media, Malta was rated at “medium-high risk”.

The results in the report were based on answers to a questionnaire completed by “independent researchers with expertise in the field of media pluralism and media freedom”.