On 15 April 2026, Péter Magyar made an appearance on the Hungarian state channel M1, where he criticised the country’s media landscape and accused the government of overspending on propaganda. The claim is impossible to verify, but likely overstated. Péter Magyar is the leader of the Tisza Party, who also became Hungary’s new prime minister…
According to the annually published World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the state of global press freedom is worse than at any point in the index’s 25-year history. More than half of the world’s countries are now classified as “difficult” or “very serious” for press freedom. Several European countries, including Germany, have…
In a speech released by the United Nations, the Secretary-General António Guterres made a mostly false statement on May 3, 2026, for Press Freedom Day. “Eighty-five percent of the crimes committed against journalists go uninvestigated and unpunished: an unacceptable level of impunity,” he stated. Why is the percentage of crimes against journalists difficult to measure?…
When I packed my bags for my Erasmus+ semester in Wilhelmshaven, I expected to explore German culture, and meet people from across Europe. I did not expect to find myself in a high-stakes, fast-paced journalism newsroom, debating the legal definitions of “crime” versus “killing” with a team of media professionals. As a tourism management student,…
Reporters Without Borders published the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, which demonstrates that while Western European countries hold high positions in press freedom, Russia and Belarus rank among the lowest globally. In its research, RSF stated that in these two countries, the authorities use anti-terrorism and anti-extremism laws to prosecute both domestic and international journalists…
An article by “Al Jazeera” from March 2026 claims that “more journalists have been killed in Gaza since the Gaza war began on October 7, 2023, than in the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam War, the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the coalition invasion of Afghanistan –…
On May 3rd, during the global observance of World Press Freedom Day, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres delivered a speech regarding the safety of media professionals, marking the occasion and highlighting the systemic failures that continue to obstruct the work of the press and endanger lives worldwide. In his speech he made the claim:…
When we started our fact-check, we thought it would be a fairly simple task. The claim was about the number of journalists killed in different wars. Find the numbers, compare them, and determine whether the claim was true or false. However, the deeper we went into the research, the more we realised that it was…
A university seminar room, cross-referencing data, verifying sources, this is how most people imagine the craft of fact-checking during their studies. However, during our international “EUFactChecking” lab, we quickly realized that research can take on very real, highly sensitive, and geopolitical dimensions. It is an experience that taught us about the fact-checking process itself, the…
Children who are born today will grow up in a different world than ours. Climate change is no longer something far away; it is a reality that shapes their future. But that future is not only negative, it mainly depends on the choices we make today. A warmer planet Scientists, such as the IPCC, agree:…