In 2022, reporters across Europe faced many forms of pressure and attacks, ranging from death threats or having their phones hacked with spyware, to being targeted with vexatious lawsuits by private companies or prevented from accessing press conferences, said a report published by the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR) in the latest edition of their biannual Monitoring Report, analysing the state of press and media freedom throughout EU Member States and candidate countries in 2022.

The MFRR recorded 17 alerts involving 30 targets. Physical violence and verbal attacks on journalists were the gravest threats to press freedom in Albania in 2022. Especially worrying was the number of incidents of police violence towards journalists, which was linked to 7 out of the 17 violations (41%) recorded on MapMF.  

Rhetoric towards journalists by the country’s Prime Minister, Edi Rama, including calls for sending journalists asking critical questions for so-called “re-education” and banning them from future press events was worrying. Overall, the environment for independent and watchdog journalism or media pluralism remains challenging.  

Albanian police were the perpetrator in 41.2% of the documented violations. In multiple disturbing cases, police physically assaulted journalists covering demonstrations. 

In January, Ledio Guni from the channel Fax News was hospitalised after being assaulted by police officers as he was filming a protest in Tirana. In addition, journalist Simon Shkreli was forcibly obstructed by police while filming a special forces operation in Shkodra, and in Tirana photojournalist Gent Shkullaku was confronted by police who 
confiscated his camera and ordered him to delete photographs of football hooligans clashing with police, claiming his photos were harming the country’s image, as quoted from the report.

However, 415 alerts were recorded in European Union Member States, while 398 were registered in candidate countries . In the EU, the main type of incidents were verbal attacks (involving 42.4% of all alerts) – such as intimidation and threats (24.6%) or insults (13.3%) – followed by legal attacks (27.2%), to which this report dedicates an extensive chapter on the year that the European Commission put forward a proposal for an EU anti-SLAPP directive. 

After legal incidents, physical attacks were the third most common type of attack against journalists and media workers in the  EU (20.5%), followed by attacks to property (15.7%) – such as equipment (8.7%) – and censorship incidents, which rose from 8.6% of the total attacks in 2021 to 14.5% in 2022.  

Private individuals remained the main perpetrators of attacks against journalists in the EU (37.8% of cases), but that represented a decrease from 50% of cases in 2021. Government and public officials were the second most common source of attacks (17.1%), followed by police and state security (11.3%). 

As for context of incidents, it is relevant to mention that while in 2021 protests were the most frequent place for journalists to be attacked (39.8%) – mostly those against COVID-19 measures or vaccination programmes – 2022 data shows that protests only accounted for 21% of the alerts, while attacks taking place online rose from 14.1% 
in 2021 to 20.7% in 2022.  

The current report dedicates its third thematic chapter to the rise of these types of online incidents, such as insults on social media or phones being hacked to spy on journalists and their sources, the report depicted.

The Monitoring Report – produced by the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF), the International Press Institute (IPI), and the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) as part of the MFRR – gathers and analyses all media freedom violations recorded on Mapping Media Freedom throughout the year 2022.