By: Jože Biščak
At one time, I (naively) still believed that the Press Freedom Index was compiled by independent institutions, that the organisation Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which launched the index, was made up of people who genuinely cared about journalism, regardless of worldview. But over the years I increasingly realised that the project is heavily ideologically burdened and defined, because the same pattern keeps repeating: when the right is in power in a given country, the index drops; when a progressive‑leaning coalition takes over the executive branch, media freedom suddenly, almost miraculously, improves. This is no coincidence.
The organisation RSF is generously funded by the Open Society Foundation, established by billionaire George Soros, which supports strongly progressive projects around the world. Although RSF claims to be completely independent of him and that Soros “only” finances part of the organisation’s work, it is hard to overlook the fact that countries which restrict the influence of his foundation tend to receive low scores. Hungary is one such example: outgoing prime minister Viktor Orbán has frequently clashed with Soros and criticised his activities against the government. Well, it seems Hungary will now receive better scores, as the latest RSF report states that after Péter Magyar’s victory, the country has a “unique opportunity … to break the deadlock in press freedom”. This, despite the fact that under Orbán’s rule no journalist was imprisoned or prosecuted for what they wrote.
The same applies to Slovenia’s rating. After the victory of the Freedom Movement in 2022, Slovenia quickly climbed the rankings, despite Robert Golob openly threatening conservative media; despite his political party establishing an “investigative commission” whose purpose was the material destruction of right‑wing media and the demonisation of their journalists; despite the pre‑election episode of Tarča on TV Slovenia being cancelled due to pressure from the government’s office, with the show’s creators admitting that during Janša’s government they had never faced such pressure as under Golob. This becomes understandable when we look at the methodology used to calculate the index. RSF sends out a questionnaire that is filled in by activists from the so‑called civil society, experts, and journalists. They rely on the network of the Varieties of Democracy project (V‑Dem), run by the V‑Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, which calculates a democracy index. This index measures deviations from “liberal democracy”, which automatically means that countries with conservative governments receive lower scores.
Who participates from Slovenia is unknown, because RSF says they do not reveal this information to protect evaluators from threats. But unofficially, it is said that the scoring is done by professors from the Faculty of Social Sciences (FDV), members of the Slovenian Journalists’ Association (DNS), and several progressively oriented NGOs. All of them are politically left‑leaning. Thus, the index is perception‑based – it relies on subjective opinions and reflects the network of activists and journalists close to the Soros ecosystem. This is why the report for Slovenia claims that “media independence and journalist safety remain fragile in practice”, because journalists, supposedly, are insulted and smeared by Janez Janša from the opposition. Not by Robert Golob, who from a position of power threatens conservative media and journalists, but by an opposition leader with no executive authority, he is presented as the one endangering media freedom.
Any criticism of journalists and media coming from the conservative ideological side is treated as a threat to media freedom. Journalists and left‑wing guilds then raise the alarm and inform the international public. This reveals their oversensitivity, but above all the bitter realisation of what ordinary people (in the age of social media this is now visible) actually think about their work. And because of openly expressed opinions, they feel threatened. If that bothers them, they have clearly chosen the wrong profession.