site.btaBulgaria Ranked 111th in 2019 World Press Freedom Index

April 18 (BTA) - Bulgaria remains 111th out of 180 countries in the latest edition of the Reporters without
Borders' World Press Freedom Index, published on Thursday. Just like in the 2018 edition of the ranking, Bulgaria is in 111th place with a score of 35.11.  

The top three countries for press freedom are Norway (7.82), Finland (7.90), and Sweden (8.31), while Turkmenistan is at the bottom of the ranking with a score of 85.44.

The description of the media environment in Bulgaria provided by Reporters without Borders reads that one might have expected an improvement in press freedom in 2018 because Bulgaria held the Council of the EU rotating presidency during the first half of the year, but instead the opposite occurred. "2018 saw TV journalist Viktoria Marinova's murder in October and a blatant attempt by the authorities to cover up the circumstances by botching the investigation. Corruption and collusion between media, politicians and oligarchs is widespread in Bulgaria. [...] The government continues to allocate EU funding to media outlets with a complete lack of transparency, with the effect of bribing recipients to go easy on the government in their reporting, or to refrain from covering certain problematic stories altogether," the NGO says. It also mentions an increase of judicial harassment of independent media and threats against reporters, "to the extent that journalism is now dangerous in Bulgaria."

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