Romania has dropped to 55th place in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index.
Just last year, it was quoted by Reporters Without Borders as being on the 49th in the world last year.
A six-point drop is significant – compared even to neighboring Moldova’s drop four points down.
Why is it concerning, in Romania’s case?
Because the Romanian Revolution’s aftermath saw a huge flurry of media diversity, as Romanians vowed never again to bow to a single voice.
Now, things are seeing a subtle but creeping shift.
Concerns involve a lack of transparency regarding media financing, particularly political party funding, and market challenges that undermine the reliability of information and public trust.
The reason? Financial instability, or what the index calls a “slow economic asphyxiation of the independent press”.
Although they take a different form in pro-EU, pro-NATO Romania, these flaws bear resemblance to the factors that have led populations out into the street in the rest of Eastern Europe.
The World Press Freedom Index evaluates an equally “problematic” decline in the USA – no longer the world’s ideal of democracy.
The sore subject of the war in Ukraine has vulnerabilized all the countries that have gone down in the report – which, as never before, has been bold enough to deem the global situation as being almost ubiquitously difficult, on its self-imposed scale.
In Eastern Europe, Albania, Montenegro and Kosovo – not in Russia’s direct radar – have improved.
Who has remained steady? Norway, Estonia, the Netherlands, Sweden.
