Report Reveals Greece’s Journalists Face Growing Threat From State

Freedom of the press and the safety of journalists in Greece is under threat, according to The European Centre For Press Media Freedom Rapid Response Group (MFRR). 

Stavros Malichudis

In November, journalist Stavros Malichudis discovered he was being watched by the Greek National Intelligence Service after reporting on a story “about a 12-year-old Syrian boy in a refugee camp on Kos island whose artwork had appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde,” according to Al Jazeera.

“In Greece, we like to condemn other countries when it comes to press freedom but never look at our own case,” Malichudis told Al Jazeera in December. “Since the issue of my monitoring became known, I have had messages of support by journalists from media from all parts of the spectrum. But most Greek media … didn’t even do a news story on this.”

Grecian public trust in the media is very low. 80 percent of Greeks believe the state controls the media, and 66 percent believe they broadcast false news. This has led to attacks on several journalists over the past few months, such as Dutch journalist Ingeborg Beugel, who was physically assaulted after a heated exchange with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis regarding his stance on asylum seekers.

The MFRR says that Mitsotakis’s party, the far-right New Democracy Party, is “obsessed with controlling the [media’s] message” and “minimizing critical and dissenting voices.” 

 “News that is inconvenient or unflattering for the government, which includes reporting on serious human rights violations, does not get reported in many outlets, creating a significant obstacle for the public’s access to information and, subsequently, their informed participation in the democratic process,” the report alleges.  It also shines light on the country’s slow response to the murder of journalist Giorgos Karaivaz in April 2021, saying the “investigation progress appears slow and lacks basic transparency, which has had a chilling effect and leads to mistrust about the authorities’ ability or willingness to protect the journalistic community.”

Last year, the government passed a law criminalizing the sharing of false information.  The law was criticized as being too broad and creating the possibility to land journalists in jail for simply editorializing. “In Greece, you now risk jail for speaking out on important issues of public interest, if the government claims it’s false,” said Eva Cossé, Greece researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The criminal sanctions risk making journalists and virtually anyone else afraid to report on or to debate important issues such as the handling of Covid-19 or migration or government economic policy.” 

Greece dropped five places in the 2021 Press Freedom Index, predicating the “dangerous cocktail for press freedom” that has reared its head in recent months. Greece now holds the fourth worst ranking in the European Union, and is ranked 70th out of 191 countries.