Highlights from the Sixth New Horizons in Journalism Conference in Sofia. Part 2
Desislava Leshtarska
The second part of the New Horizons in Journalism conference, organized by the World Press Institute (WPI) in partnership with the America for Bulgaria Foundation (ABF) and the Association of European Journalists – Bulgaria (AEJ-Bulgaria), focuses on a deeper, structural question: What is journalism compromising – and what compromises must it give up in order to continue to exist?
Three sessions framed the answer: a global keynote on the link between censorship and corruption, a personal account of reporting from war zones, and a panel on the daily compromises of newsroom life.
Press freedom is not abstract
Robert Guest, deputy editor of The Economist, opened the afternoon by projecting a satellite image of the Korean peninsula at night. South Korea: a constellation of light. North Korea: near-total darkness. Two countries, he reminded the room, share five thousand years of culture and history and were divided only in 1950 — yet South Korea is now roughly twenty to thirty times richer than its neighbor. “Times, not percent,” Guest said. “If anyone ever tells you free speech doesn’t matter, show them this map.”
His starting point was an Economist study of 180 countries over eight decades, which found a measurable predictive relationship — what economists call Granger causality — between media freedom and corruption. When the press is constrained, corruption begins to rise within roughly four years; the lag is politically convenient, because a leader can clamp down on critical coverage now and let voters discover the resulting graft only after the next election. The relationship runs in both directions, he noted: rising corruption also predicts a tightening of censorship, because rulers have more to hide. Populism, he argued, sits at the center of the dynamic, weakening the courts and bureaucracies that hold both in check.
Guest sketched three contemporary tools of press suppression. The first is rhetorical: Argentina’s president telling crowds that “we don’t hate journalists enough,” India’s critical reporters labeled “presstitutes” by the ruling party, and President Trump publishing lists of “dishonest journalists” with names and photographs on the White House website. UNESCO data, he noted, finds that three-quarters of female journalists have received online abuse; in India, AI-generated images of Muslim women journalists have been auctioned online as “sex slaves.” The second tool is legal: civil libel suits filed not to win but to drain reporters financially — including Trump’s billion-dollar claims over reporting that is both true and in the public interest, and the experience of the editor of Serbia’s Krik, who has been investigated for tax fraud thirty times and spends five days a month in court. The third tool is economic: state advertising directed only to friendly outlets, companies pressured not to advertise with critical ones, and oligarchs buying struggling newspapers “not for profit, but to please the government in exchange for public contracts.” Hungary and Turkey, he said, offer the textbook cases.
The American press itself, Guest acknowledged, is largely protected by the country’s federalism, independent courts, the First Amendment and a competitive media market. The Trump administration’s most consequential effect on journalism is global: the State Department has stopped subsidizing independent media abroad and stopped pressing foreign leaders to release jailed journalists. The signal carried fast. In Azerbaijan, Guest said, the president jailed roughly one hundred journalists — effectively the country’s entire dissident media ecosystem — within days of the new administration’s inauguration. AI is widening the channel. Iran has been distributing Lego-style animated videos critical of Trump, scored with rap and “feeling very American”; one received more than a billion views in its first month and, on closer inspection, was carrying anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories. Europe, he added, should not assume the problem is foreign: Germany maintains laws against insulting politicians, Britain arrests roughly thirty people a day under a “grossly offensive” speech statute, and more than a dozen European countries still have anti-blasphemy laws on the books. “If you tell people they have a right not to be offended,” he said, “you’re giving them a weapon.”
He closed with what he called the Hungarian endgame. Viktor Orbán controlled Hungarian media for sixteen years, and his allies became the country’s richest men; only when the European Union finally cut off funding equivalent to four percent of GDP did the corruption become legible enough for voters to act. They voted him out. “When you see a politician who wants to suppress the media,” Guest said, “nine times out of ten he’s got something to hide. And nine times out of ten, that thing is: he’s a crook.”
Conviction, not hope
Arwa Damon, the former CNN senior international correspondent who founded the children’s humanitarian organization INARA, did not, in her short talk, present herself as a war reporter. She went to Gaza four times in 2024 — not as a journalist, since journalists are not allowed in, but on humanitarian missions; in 2025 she was denied entry herself. The detail she chose from her last visit was not about the negotiations to bring soap, flour and tents, but about a moment on a bathroom floor, sobbing over a few baby mice she had tried and failed to save. “It wasn’t really about the mice,” she said. “It was about the need to just be able to do something.” She then asked the room who in it felt too much pressure; many hands rose. The emotion generated by this kind of work, she said, is itself “a weapon in the arsenal of those who do not want us to keep reporting.”
For most of her career, Damon said, she carried a belief that if people understood the human toll of war they would force change. They did not. The work of the past decade has been to dismantle that belief and replace it with something smaller and more durable — including, eventually, eye-movement desensitization therapy, which she had resisted out of fear that it would take her anger and, with it, her fire. It didn’t. “The way I was processing everything was poisoning me,” she said. “It was preventing me from fully doing my job.”
She closed with what she said is now the question she is most often asked, and her answer to it. “People ask, ‘What gives you hope?’ I don’t have hope. But I’m still doing this. Because I fundamentally believe in it. They don’t get to win. I don’t believe the victors get to be the only ones to tell the story. Even if it doesn’t change history, history has to have that record.”
What journalism won’t give up
The panel that followed turned the day’s argument inside out: from what is being done to journalism, to what journalism is doing — and not doing — to itself. The moderator, Kate West, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a former broadcast journalist, opened with a statistic from her teaching. Every former student of hers who had left the profession within five years had cited the same reason: their mental health. “Gen Z is not less passionate,” she said. “They are less willing to silently absorb the cost.” That, she argued, was a reason to change newsroom culture, not a reason to dismiss a generation.
Catarina Carvalho, who five years ago left Diário de Notícias — Portugal’s oldest newspaper — to co-found the Lisbon hyperlocal Mensagem de Lisboa, offered one model of the change. The outlet defines itself as “neighbors in a city”: one story a day, no politicians on the page unless interviewed by ordinary residents, dinners with readers, a weekly chronicle by a man who lives on the street. It runs as a small for-profit company funded by grants, sponsorships and live events; the journalist, she said, now has to be also a fundraiser. Asked why she left, Carvalho turned the question to the profession. “We wanted connections with the powerful, not with people living on the streets,” she said. “Journalists are very vain. We think we are the power because we speak to power. We’re not.” The reward, she added, was a different kind of freedom: “Not free to do what I want — free because I feel people are asking me to do this.”
Damon pushed back, mildly, on the mental-health framing. “There’s a bit too much room being created for ‘I can’t do this,'” she said. The reframe she proposed was routine over toughness: build newsrooms that give journalists the tools to get through a hard day without further harm, and treat the work of handling one’s mental state as one would treat a headache. “I take an aspirin and get through my day. I need to be able to handle my mental health and still get through my day.”
Bisera Zankova, a Bulgarian media-regulation lawyer, supplied the missing institutional piece. A decade ago, she said, proposals to extend the Criminal Code’s protections to journalists — as they exist for doctors and teachers — found no interest in the Bulgarian parliament or government. UNESCO data, she added, shows journalism has the shortest career duration of any profession. “For many years we concentrated on media as institutions,” Zankova said. “But we missed what a journalist actually is — their mind, their feelings, their personal problems. That niche, between the institutional and the personal, is what we have to fill in.”
Asked at the close what each would refuse to surrender, the panelists answered briefly. Damon: integrity — being able to stand behind anything attached to her name. Carvalho: joy, and the sense that a story is connected to the moment one is living in. Zankova, returning to the conference’s title: the search for truth. “At the core of freedom of expression is the search for truth,” she said. “Let’s put our soul in it.”
The conference closed with a brief reflection from Camila Bath of the World Press Institute. “The pressures we create for ourselves,” she said, “don’t require funding or international coalitions. They require honesty and willingness to look at ourselves as clearly as we look at the systems and people we cover.”
