We are being outlobbied
The European Parliament's draft would shrink journalism's share of the next EU budget. Nobody did this to us on purpose, which is somehow worse.
Bad news about the media ecosystem used to come from a predictable cast of villains.
When something went wrong for journalism in Hungary over the last 16 years, you knew exactly who arranged it, why, and which state-aligned oligarch or government decree would deliver it. The global version worked the sameish way. Whenever the business of news got turned on its head somewhere, you could reliably trace it back to a trillion-dollar tech company explaining, with great patience, that it was merely a neutral platform, that it doesn’t make content, it just happens to collect most of the money your content generates.
An antagonist gives you a story, a strategy, and on some days, maybe even a sense of purpose.
The bad news we’re bringing today has no antagonist. The MEPs involved are probably well-meaning. The cultural sector is well-meaning. Civil society is well-meaning. Everyone is conscientiously advocating for their own corner, exactly as they should. But the sum of all this well-meaning self-interest is that the invisible hand is now somewhat visibly showing the finger to the journalism industry.
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What the rapporteurs propose
Two editions ago we briefly covered the draft report by the two MEPs in charge of AgoraEU, Emma Rafowicz (Culture committee) and Alice Kuhnke (Civil Liberties). Having now spent more time with the text, and having compared notes with partners across the sector, the picture has not improved.
If you are new to the EU budget negotiation process, start here:
An in-depth look at the most important media funding programs proposed in the new EU budget
The problem at the heart of Europe’s journalism funding debate
Microlooting the next EU budget
The headline change: journalism would get its own strand. Under the Commission’s original proposal, news support was bundled into MEDIA+ alongside the audiovisual industries, the stated logic being that movies, games and news face some overlapping structural pressures (platform dependency, AI disruption, collapsing distribution, the usual suspects). The rapporteurs propose to carve out a separate “Information and Journalism“ strand instead.
On the architecture itself, we are mostly agnostic. There are respectable technocratic arguments for both setups, and a dedicated strand has one real advantage: the money is visibly ours and harder to quietly reallocate to the next European prestige film fund. So while separation could be fine, separation with a smaller budget is not, and it seems like that is what’s on the table. Our position, shared by partners across the sector, is that a standalone strand only works with a fixed allocation of at least 20% of AgoraEU: roughly what journalism could have expected under the Commission's original architecture. The rapporteurs are proposing considerably less.
The math is going the wrong way
The Commission gave MEDIA+ €3.2 billion without specifying the split between audiovisual and news. We didn’t love the ambiguity; our proposal was 40% audiovisual, 40% news, 20% flexibility buffer, since “flexibility” is one of those Brussels magic words that, like competitiveness and security, seems to act on European officials as a powerful psychedelic, rendering them highly suggestible. If we assumed something around a 50-50 split, it would have meant roughly €1.6 billion for journalism over seven years.
The rapporteurs propose increasing the overall AgoraEU envelope from €8.6 billion to €10.7 billion, and allocating a fixed 11.7% of it to “Information and Journalism”. That’s about €1.25 billion. So: a bigger overall program, a smaller journalism share than the one implied by the Commission’s smaller original proposal. Culture and civil society allocations grow substantially, ours shrinks.
And €1.25 billion is the optimistic scenario. The Parliament can wish for a larger envelope; the member states pay for it, and the prevailing mood in the Council at any given moment is not generosity. If the final budget lands closer to the Commission’s €8.6 billion baseline, 11.7% becomes roughly €1 billion, which against the current MFF is little if any increase. When the rapporteurs’ defenders suggested in the Parliament debate that this amounts to a tenfold increase for journalism, that is, to put it gently, not a calculation we can reproduce.
For scale: by the Commission’s own estimates, EU news media revenues are running about €7 billion lower per year than in 2019. Nobody is asking the EU to backfill that hole. But if Europe’s answer to a €7-billion-a-year structural disruption is €1 billion over seven years, we should moderate our expectations about what Europe actually intends to do for its pluralistic information ecosystem.