Press freedom and pluralism
Press freedom and pluralism
Can journalists work in Spain without pressure, and is there a variety of independent media? Several international organisations assess this every year with indices that are comparable across countries. This page brings together the four main ones and places Spain among the 27 EU countries: the World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders, the Media Pluralism Monitor of the European University Institute, the V-Dem media indicators and the alerts of the Council of Europe Platform for the protection of journalism.
How to read this page
These are assessments by those organisations, based on questionnaires to journalists, academics and experts, not direct measurements. Each looks at different things: RSF, the conditions for practising journalism; the Media Pluralism Monitor, the risks to pluralism (laws, concentration of ownership, independence, access); V-Dem, censorship, harassment and bias; the Council of Europe, specific cases of threats recorded by journalists' organisations.
Methods change over the years and differences of a few points or places are not usually significant. What matters is the trend and the gap with the EU.
Trend
Trend · percent
Trend · / 100
Trend · per 10 million inhabitants
World Press Freedom Index
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranks some 180 countries every year according to the conditions for practising journalism, based on a questionnaire to journalists, academics and human rights defenders and on its own tally of attacks on journalists. Spain is ranked 29 of 180 in the 2026 edition and 17 of the 27 EU countries. Its best ranking was 23 (2025 edition) and its worst, 44 (2009).
On the axis, a higher number is a worse position. The background bands mark the party of the central government (PSOE or PP) purely as a time reference: the index assesses the whole country, not just the government. Each edition is published in spring and mainly assesses the previous year. The number of countries ranked has gone from 139 in 2002 to 180, so the rankings of the early years are not fully comparable.
The five RSF indicators
Since 2022 RSF has broken the score down into five indicators: political context (pressure from political power and support for media independence), economic (media sustainability, concentration, allocation of public aid and advertising), legal framework (laws and their application), social context (social respect for journalists, pressure from groups) and security (attacks, threats, arrests). In 2026, Spain's best ranking is in Seguridad de los periodistas (1 in the world) and its worst in Contexto económico (40).
Edition by edition
Spain's rank in each edition and the party in government on 1 July of the year that edition assesses. This describes the calendar, it does not attribute responsibility: the assessment also reflects the conduct of regional governments, courts, media companies and other actors.
Risk to media pluralism
The Media Pluralism Monitor (MPM) of the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom (European University Institute, Florence) uses a team of researchers in each country to assess some 200 questions grouped into four areas. The result is a risk from 0 to 100 %: higher is worse. In the MPM2026 edition, Spain's overall risk is 53 % (band: Medio-alto).
- Fundamental protection: freedom of expression, right to information, working conditions and safety of journalists, and independence of the regulator.
- Market plurality: transparency of ownership, concentration, economic viability of the media and commercial influence on what they publish.
- Political independence: political control of the media, independence of public service media, allocation of institutional advertising and aid, editorial autonomy.
- Social inclusiveness: access for minorities, local communities, women and people with disabilities, and media literacy.
Spain compared with the EU average
The EU average is the simple average of the 27 countries that currently make up the EU, in the editions in which the MPM assessed all of them. In the MPM2026 edition, Spain had higher risk than the average in 3 of the four areas.
The questionnaire changes with each edition, so jumps of a few points between editions do not always reflect real changes. There were no editions in 2018 or 2019 (MPM2020 covers 2018 and 2019).
Censorship, harassment and bias according to V-Dem
The V-Dem project (University of Gothenburg) asks several experts per country every year to assess, among other things, whether the government attempts to censor the press, whether journalists are harassed, whether the media self-censor and whether they are biased against the opposition. A statistical model turns this into scores comparable across countries and years, summarised in a freedom of expression index from 0 to 100.
These four indicators are on the V-Dem model scale (roughly from -4 to +4): the higher, the more freedom (less censorship, less harassment, less self-censorship, less bias). In 2025:
Council of Europe alerts
The Council of Europe Platform to promote the protection of journalism and safety of journalists publishes alerts about serious threats to press freedom (attacks, arrests, harassment, abusive lawsuits, political pressure) recorded by its partner organisations, such as the European Federation of Journalists or RSF. States can respond to each alert. Between 2015 and 2025, 57 alerts were published about Spain, 8 of them without a reply from the State. To compare countries of different sizes, they are counted per 10 million inhabitants.
A low count does not necessarily mean fewer problems: it depends on which cases the partner organisations decide to record and how much presence they have in each country.
Methodology and sources
- World Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders, CSV files for each edition (2002-2010 and from 2012; the 2012 edition covers 2011-2012). The official rank and score are reproduced as they are, citing RSF, without averages or calculations of our own (the terms of use of rsf.org reserve all rights). The scores of three periods are not comparable: 2002-2012 (open-ended scale, 0 = best), 2013-2021 (0-100) and from 2022 (new methodology with five indicators). The EU rank is simply the order of the official ranks among the 27 countries that currently make up the EU.
- Media Pluralism Monitor, Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom (European University Institute), CC BY 4.0 licence. Editions MPM2016, MPM2017 and MPM2020 onwards (there was no MPM2018 or MPM2019); edition N assesses year N-1. Past editions transcribed from the PDF country reports in the Cadmus repository and the latest one from the CMPF's country sheets. For MPM2025 only Spain's data are available. Overall risk: the figure published by the CMPF or, in editions that did not publish it, the simple average of the four areas (as the CMPF has calculated it since 2022). Up to MPM2024 there were three risk bands (low, medium, high) and from MPM2025, six.
- V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy, University of Gothenburg), via Our World in Data: government censorship (v2mecenefm), harassment of journalists (v2meharjrn), self-censorship (v2meslfcen) and media bias (v2mebias), central estimate of the measurement model; and freedom of expression index (0-1, multiplied by 100). Licences CC BY-SA 4.0 (V-Dem) and CC BY 4.0 (OWID). EU average: simple average of the current member states, only in years with data for at least 90 % of them.
- Alerts, Council of Europe Platform to promote the protection of journalism and safety of journalists, count by country and year since 2015 (year of the alert according to the portal), with Eurostat's average annual population. The status of each alert (replied, resolved) is as of the download date.
- None of these indices measures audiences or media quality. For the public money the media receive, see Public money in the media.