Recently, the European Union moved forward with comprehensive new media freedom law, the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA). The EMFA includes a number of important reforms meant to protect journalistic independence, including prohibitions on interference in editorial decisionmaking and protections for sources. But one of the proposed reforms is especially important for those who care about preserving the media’s role as an anticorruption watchdog: the EMFA’s rules on government advertising in private media. The EMFA requires that governments (1) adopt fair, transparent, and objective standards for the distribution of state advertising revenue to journalists, and (2) make efforts to disclose how those funds are distributed. Because governments often use advertising spending as implicit or explicit leverage to suppress and deter anticorruption reporting, these changes will likely have a significant effect. As countries outside of the EU struggle with similar issues, they should follow the EMFA model.

The EMFA model may be especially valuable in Central and Eastern Europe. After the post-socialist transitions, media organizations in these countries found themselves free of state control—at least in part. But despite privatization, many of those media companies, struggling to stay afloat, have turned to their governments for advertising revenue. This has proven to be a devil’s bargain. The fact that state advertising has become a major source of revenue for media outlets has given governments a tool that they can leverage to influence coverage, stifling anticorruption reporting. When new parties come to power, they often redirect advertising funds to media organizations that bury corruption news, financially sinking the organizations that are willing to call out misconduct. Journalists that do break corruption stories see their funding quickly disappear. Even without direct pressure, media organizations have been afraid to call out the actors that effectively fund them, and they understand that the government will reward friendly media companies with extra money. The result is that media outlets do not invest time and energy into investigating potential government misconduct, and they fail to run, or underemphasize, stories highlighting corruption allegations. (This problem is hardly limited to Europe: States across the world use advertising to influence the media, often to great success. And studies in Argentina, Ghana, and Turkey, for instance, have found that government advertising in media outlets reduces coverage of government corruption.)

The most direct solution to this problem—eliminating or significantly reducing government ad spending—is unrealistic. Given how unreliable private advertising has become, many journalists are dependent on state dollars, and taking that funding away could tank them economically. Although some organizations are starting to develop alternative business models, it is too risky to rely on those models before they have proven successful. Neither are grants or other support from NGOs plentiful enough as of now. But as the EU recognized, there are ways to mitigate the risk that media dependence on state advertising revenue will lead to the suppression of corruption-related news.

The key is to develop fair, transparent, and objective legal standards for the distribution of state advertising money. Right now, many European governments have significant discretion over where to place ads, with little to no guidance or constraints. This allows politicians to either retaliate when a media outlet reports on a corruption scandal or hand money to politically aligned platforms that are less likely to run such reports. The lack of transparency also makes it hard to tell when this impropriety has occurred. The EMFA will help address these issues in two principal ways:

• First, the EMFA requires that advertising funds be distributed in accordance with transparent, objective, proportionate, and non-discriminatory criteria (without specifying what those criteria should be). If ad spending is tied to a concrete, objective metric—for instance, if it is proportional to a newspaper’s readership—then journalists would have less reason to fear a loss of revenue based on the types of corruption stories they run.
• Second, to ensure transparency and compliance, the EMFA requires governments to disclose where their ad money is going. This greater transparency makes it easier for journalists to challenge government decisions to withdraw advertising as being inconsistent with legal requirements. Furthermore, even if direct legal enforcement is not feasible, greater transparency would at least enable the citizens to better evaluate whether the government has been leveraging its economic influence to secure biased news coverage.

The EMFA approach should be extended to other countries. Around the world, state advertising processes suffer from a similar lack of transparency and objectivity. Even basic regulations would make a difference. As EU member states begin to implement the broad requirements of the EMFA, the anticorruption community should pay close attention, with an eye towards applying the EU’s experience elsewhere.

To be sure, cleaning up the government advertising process won’t solve the issue of biased corruption coverage. Ideological alignment with the government, ties to politicians, and fear of public retaliation can also influence a media organization’s coverage of public corruption. Nevertheless, studies confirm that limiting government discretion can have a significant impact on corruption reporting. Enacting measures modeled on the EMFA would be an important step toward ensuring that corruption investigation and reporting is worth the investment, thereby ensuring that the media performs play their essential role in uncovering government misconduct.