Media pluralism after the EMFA: time for a European monitor

For more than a decade, the Media Pluralism Monitor (MPM) has done something rare in European policy: It has turned media pluralism from a principle into an object of measurement. By comparing risks across national media systems, the MPM has given Europe a common framework for assessing media freedom, plurality, editorial independence, concentration, and social inclusiveness. It has tracked risks, and in doing so has shaped how Europe understands them.

That achievement opens possibilities and raises a new question. If Europe has developed a common language for analysing media pluralism, is it still enough to assess it only through national systems?

For a long time, the answer was broadly yes. The MPM was designed for a world in which media pluralism was primarily understood as a feature of national media orders. That remains partly true. Law, politics, ownership structures, public service media governance, and protections for journalists still vary sharply across member states. National monitoring remains indispensable.

But the environment in which the MPM operates has changed. Media distribution is increasingly shaped by cross-border digital infrastructures. The sustainability of journalism is affected by platform power and AI intermediation. Citizens move across member states far more than traditional media analysis typically assumes. And EU law now plays a more direct role in shaping the conditions under which media operate. The national frame still matters, but it no longer captures the whole picture.

European standard for media freedom and media pluralism

This is where the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) marks a turning point. The EMFA, which puts in place a set of rules to protect media pluralism and independence in the EU, does not simply add another layer of regulation. It establishes a common framework for media services in the internal market and rests on a clear premise: Media freedom and media pluralism can no longer be addressed solely within national boundaries, because the conditions shaping them are European in scale. The Regulation explicitly recognises that media services are increasingly digital, cross-border, and subject to common structural pressures.

Once that point is accepted, the analytical consequence is difficult to avoid. If the EU is now articulating an explicit European standard for media freedom and media pluralism, should it still rely exclusively on national risk assessment to gauge its realisation? The MPM’s own findings suggest that it should not.

For instance, in the 2025 edition, ‘Market Plurality’ remains the weakest area, on average, across the Union. More strikingly, the indicator on plurality in digital markets records a very high risk across the EU on average. This is not a collection of unrelated national failures. It reflects a common structural condition: Digital markets are concentrated above the level of the member state, and a small number of gatekeepers shape visibility, traffic, monetisation, and access to information across Europe as a whole.

The same is even more evident in the case of foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI), which is not simply another media risk within Europe. It is a risk to Europe as an information space. It moves across borders, relies on common platforms and infrastructures, and seeks to distort public communication at a scale that no single national media system can fully contain. Its inclusion in the EMFA’s monitoring architecture matters for precisely that reason. FIMI makes visible, in particularly sharp form, that some of the most serious threats to pluralism are European by nature, not merely national risks repeated many times over.

European Media Pluralism Monitor

For these reasons, Europe now needs a second layer of monitoring: not a replacement for the national MPM, but a complement to it. What is needed is a European Media Pluralism Monitor capable of assessing European systemic risks to media pluralism.

This should not be confused with producing an EU average. Averages are useful, and the MPM already provides them. But an EU average still aggregates national conditions; it does not capture the European information space as such. It does not tell us whether citizens can access plural and reliable information on European affairs across borders, whether language continues to confine them within national informational silos, whether platforms and AI interfaces distort the visibility of public-interest journalism, or whether EU safeguards are producing real convergence in practice rather than compliance on paper.

The case for such a European monitor is not only conceptual. It is also embedded in the EMFA itself. Article 26 requires the Commission to ensure an independent annual monitoring exercise of the internal market for media services, supported by key performance indicators, methodological safeguards, and public reporting. That exercise must cover media markets in all member states, concentration, foreign information manipulation and interference, the impact of online platforms, editorial independence, and state advertising. The EMFA, in other words, does not merely attempt to improve media freedom. It establishes a common standard and calls for a dedicated monitoring architecture.

There is also a strong argument from continuity. The MPM is no longer just a comparative research tool on the margins of policy debate. Media pluralism and media freedom form one of the four pillars of the European Commission’s annual Rule of Law Report, and recent country chapters explicitly cite MPM country reports among their relevant sources. The monitor has therefore already moved into the wider architecture of EU democratic oversight. A European extension would not break with that trajectory; it would expand it coherently.

A further reason is operational. MPM country reports do not stop at diagnosis. They conclude with recommendations addressed to national actors: governments, parliaments, regulators, publishers, journalistic bodies, and, in some cases, digital platforms and industry stakeholders. That recommendation logic is one of the MPM’s strengths. But here too the national frame shows its limits. If some of the most important risks to pluralism are European in nature, then recommendations addressed only to member state actors are no longer sufficient. Member states cannot by themselves resolve platform dependency, cross-border discoverability failures, multilingual asymmetries, FIMI, or uneven implementation of EU safeguards. A European Media Pluralism Monitor could therefore do more than identify European-level risks. It could also enable recommendations addressed explicitly to the EU itself: to the Commission, to the EMFA governance framework, to the European Parliament, and to other relevant European bodies when the problem cannot be effectively tackled through national action alone.

European public sphere

What, then, should such a European monitor actually measure? This requires further research, but its contours are already visible.

Not the average condition of national media systems, but specifically European vulnerabilities. It should examine the cross-border accessibility of news on European affairs: whether citizens can reach plural and reliable reporting on EU politics beyond their domestic media sphere. It should assess linguistic permeability: whether language barriers are being reduced through translation, subtitling, multilingual publishing, and AI tools, or whether they still confine citizens within national informational silos. It should analyse the discoverability of public-interest journalism on platforms and AI interfaces, where visibility is increasingly shaped by ranking and recommendation systems rather than editorial choice alone. It should evaluate publishers’ dependency on a small number of digital intermediaries for traffic, audience reach, and monetisation, as well as the practical effectiveness of EMFA safeguards across member states. It should explicitly include foreign information manipulation and interference, which is by definition a cross-border and European-level risk. Finally, it should assess whether mobile EU citizens, border communities, and transnational audiences can access a sufficiently plural and intelligible news environment where they actually live.

None of this implies the emergence of a single European media system replacing national ones. Europe remains linguistically diverse, politically uneven, and institutionally layered. But that is precisely why this new layer of analysis is needed. If the European information space is fragmented, asymmetrical, and only partially integrated, those features should themselves become objects of measurement. The aim is not to assume a European public sphere into existence. It is to assess how far the conditions for one are present, evolving, or deteriorating.

Tags: Media, Digital, Information, media pluralism