Highlights from the sixth “New Horizons in Journalism” conference in Sofia. Part 1.
In an age of editorial pressure, blocked broadcasts and AI-driven disinformation, the sixth edition of “New Horizons in Journalism,” held on May 14 at the Hilton Sofia under the theme “Truth Under Pressure,” became a working meeting on the state of independent reporting. The day’s sessions returned, again and again, to a single working assumption: that journalism today is rarely silenced by overt censorship, but eroded through ownership, advertising, political proximity and small editorial compromises. The conference is 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).
The hard path
The conference was convened, for the sixth consecutive year, by the World Press Institute (WPI), the Association of European Journalists – Bulgaria (AEJ-Bulgaria) and the America for Bulgaria Foundation (ABF). Nancy Schiller, president and chief executive of ABF, opened with an anecdote from more than 30 years ago, when a senior U.S. congressman dismissed her employer’s factual defense in a civil lawsuit. “I don’t care about the truth,” she recalled him saying. “Perception is reality.” From that exchange she drew a line to Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts,” to a 9,500-percent surge in sales of Orwell’s 1984, and on to today’s environment of algorithmic disinformation. The foundation, she said, has supported independent journalism in Bulgaria for seventeen years not as a cultural project but as democratic infrastructure: “Our democracies depend on it. The need for quality journalism has never been greater, and your task has never been more challenging.”
Maria Cheresheva, speaking for AEJ-Bulgaria, addressed the room and rejected a piece of advice put to her the night before — that journalists sometimes need to mislead in order to reach the truth. “As a journalist I cannot agree with this,” she said. “We have chosen the hard path.” In the days before the conference, AEJ-Bulgaria had temporarily renamed Sofia’s “Journalist Square” — the small plaza marked by a statue of the dissident Georgi Markov — as “Censored Square,” to make self-censorship, in her phrase, “more visible.” The Committee to Protect Journalists recorded 130 killings of journalists worldwide last year, the highest figure on record; that level of violence, she said, Bulgaria does not face, but Bulgarian censorship operates instead as “something in the shadows, something we know is there but cannot explain or show.” Small businesses around the square — a florist, a bakery, a locksmith — had given over their own advertising panels for the campaign and asked that the messages remain up through the month. “People want the truth,” she said. “They don’t run from it. They run from being misled and lied to.”
David McDonald, executive chair of the World Press Institute, placed the day in a six-year arc that began in Sofia in 2021. Past editions, he said, had taken on journalism in the internet age, disinformation, artificial intelligence, global elections and the question of who gets to tell a story; “Truth Under Pressure” drew on each of them. WPI itself, founded in Minneapolis–Saint Paul more than sixty years ago, runs an annual two-month fellowship in the United States that has now passed 600 alumni from more than 100 countries. With support from the America for Bulgaria Foundation, a Bulgarian journalist has joined every cohort for the past twelve years; the outgoing 2025 fellow, Ivana Georgiev, took the stage to introduce her 2026 successor, a foreign-news editor at bTV. McDonald also noted that his home city had returned to the international news cycle this year — both for the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and for federal immigration raids that left two U.S. citizens dead — in ways the morning’s later speakers would address directly.
Off air, but not silent
The morning’s first short talk came from Maria Tsantsarova, a former bTV anchor who was taken off air in December 2025, immediately after a morning broadcast that turned out to be her last. She had asked, in her own description, “too many questions, demanded arguments for editorial decisions, defended the opposition’s right to airtime.” Bulgarian censorship, she said, rarely arrives as a direct ban; it works through smaller editorial decisions — “this topic isn’t interesting,” “too complex for people,” “we can’t have the opposition without the government” — until certain stories simply stop appearing. What surprised her, she told the conference, was not the dismissal itself but what followed: colleagues at competing outlets covered her case, viewers drifted away from the broadcaster, and the company “began to lose its most important asset — the trust of its audience.”
In mid-February 2026, with several respected colleagues, she co-founded the Foundation for Independent Journalism and its platform “Извън ефир” — “Off Air” — funded entirely by audience donations. “Our only boss is our audience,” she said. Within weeks the platform hosted what she described as Bulgaria’s only genuine pre-election debate, drawing more than two million views — beyond the reach of any national television station — and the next day published an investigation into dependencies inside the judicial system that prompted a government response within 24 hours. “Journalists like us make big media visible,” she said. “We don’t need big media to be visible.”
The morning keynote that followed extended the same problem to a global scale. Steven Capus, president and chief executive of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, told the conference that “this is a time of information warfare, and the good guys are losing some precious ground.” In Iran, he said, what he described as the most successful internet blockade ever attempted has now been in place for more than three months: the network’s Persian service, Radio Farda, lost ninety percent of its social-media audience overnight and now reaches Iranian audiences mainly through shortwave, AM and satellite. Russia has blocked 8,700 websites and seven VPN protocols, but Russians still downloaded 9.2 million VPNs in March alone. In China, the Great Firewall now monitors more than 10,000 websites using artificial intelligence and deep-packet inspection.
The cost to RFE/RL has been severe. After months of court battles and bipartisan advocacy, President Trump eventually signed a reduced funding bill; the 75-year-old broadcaster lost roughly a third of its budget as a result, and has closed its Bulgarian, Romanian, Hungarian and Pakistani services. New private foundations in the Czech Republic and Ukraine are continuing parts of the work, and the former head of RFE/RL’s Bulgarian service, Ivan Bedrov, now runs an independent investigative organization in Bulgaria.
Today, free media across Europe face severe funding shortages while authoritarian regimes wage a massive information war. In countries like Iran, Russia, and China, internet blackouts and censorship are not just a technological inconvenience, but a weapon used to cover up repression and violence. In this aggressive environment, circumvention tools—such as VPNs, encrypted messaging, and satellite internet—are no longer a luxury or a consumer preference, but a vital “infrastructure of resistance” that is as critical to freedom as artillery is in physical combat. Even the best journalism is meaningless if it cannot reach the people, and the cost is immense: right now, numerous journalists are sitting in prison cells just for doing their jobs.
To counter this pressure, there is an urgent need for increased funding for independent media and protective technologies, including through public-private partnerships. A free press is never a given, it is democracy itself; therefore, building secure distribution tools is the only way forward. Ultimately, just as decades of combined pressure from journalists and dissidents brought down the Berlin Wall, today’s digital walls will also fall, provided we all keep pushing hard together—because failure is not an option.
The hollowed center
David Schultz, professor of political science at Hamline University in Minneapolis, brought a long view to the morning’s middle stretch. In 1976, he said, U.S. public opinion formed a near-perfect bell curve: centrist candidates, 120 swing congressional districts, 10 to 15 percent persuadable voters and a steady stream of bipartisan legislation. By 2026, that distribution has hollowed into two narrow peaks — roughly 30 to 40 swing districts remain, and the share of genuinely persuadable voters is closer to zero to five percent.
The drivers, Schultz argued, are economic restructuring, generational turnover and the transformation of media from broadcast to social: news that once reached everyone now reaches the like-minded. “You tell me you drive a Subaru, I know exactly how you vote,” he said.
In that environment, the November midterm elections become harder to predict than the historical pattern alone would suggest. President Trump’s approval rating, in the mid-thirties, would normally point to a Democratic blue wave; but the Democratic Party, Schultz noted, carries a 60 percent unfavorable rating of its own, and is running on a single negative message — “we are not Trump” — without offering a clear alternative. The issue that will actually decide voters, he said, is basic affordability: “milk, bread, and eggs.” His forecast was cautious. A narrow Democratic majority in the House is possible, the Senate will likely end near 50–50, and even an electoral win, he warned, may not give the winning party the ability to govern.
The community as the source
John Collins, a reporter at Minnesota Public Radio, used his short talk to take the morning to Minneapolis. Earlier this year, the federal government sent roughly 4,000 immigration agents into Minnesota — population 5.5 million — compared with about 400 deployed to Chicago. Masked officers in unmarked vehicles, often without visible identification, detained people on the street, Collins said, among them green-card holders, asylum seekers and U.S. citizens. Children stopped going to school; classrooms emptied; two civilians were killed by federal agents during the operations, and the federal government has not cooperated with state prosecution.
The story he asked the room to take from Minnesota was less about the raids than about the response. Coffee shops kept boxes of whistles by the door — “ICE is here, stay inside if vulnerable, come out if not.” Signal and WhatsApp networks tracked unmarked vehicles in real time; neighbors patrolled outside schools and daycare centers. “This was not a protest,” Collins said. “This was residents using their First Amendment rights.” After weeks of sustained community resistance, he said, the administration backed down for the first time in the current term.
For local journalism, Collins argued, the lesson was uncomfortable. The federal government had labeled victims “domestic terrorists” before any facts were established, and had used AI to distort images of civil rights leaders; without independent local reporting, the official narrative would have travelled largely unchallenged. “We prioritize access to people in power over access to the community,” he told the conference, “and this must change. We’re in a pretty epic fight for democracy. We can’t just say journalism is fundamental to it anymore — we need to prove it through our actions.”
The objectivity question
The morning’s final short talk came from Pauliina Grym, a Finnish broadcaster with twenty years at the public service Yle and a current World Press Institute fellow researching activist journalism. She opened with a show of hands: who in the room believed they could be entirely objective? None rose. Objectivity, she went on, was not handed down from journalism’s founding principles but introduced as a commercial decision; in the early twentieth century the Associated Press realized that a single non-partisan version of the news could be sold more widely than competing partisan versions. “Objectivity sounds very non-capitalist,” she said, “but originally, it wasn’t.”
Her research, conducted with the independent collective Unicorn Riot during the Minneapolis protests of last summer, traced one logical destination of the alternative — explicit advocacy journalism. Unicorn Riot’s coverage of clashes with police was deliberately partial: rocks thrown at officers and police responses were filmed, vandalism and arson by protesters were not. “Police get coverage in mainstream media; they don’t need it from us,” one of its journalists told her. Another, she added, distrusts the BBC, Reuters and Western mainstream outlets so thoroughly that he prefers Russia Today — an illustration, she suggested, of how the rejection of imperfect objectivity can collapse into the embrace of state propaganda.
She closed with a thought experiment about complete transparency. If objectivity is impossible and journalists are instead obliged to reveal everything that shapes their views, what should the disclosures include? She read out one possible list: name, age, education, voting record, parents’ politics, divorce proceedings, children’s school records, sexual orientation, religion, mortgage, diet, medications, addictions, past trauma. Then she turned the list into questions for the room. “We all agree we can’t be objective. We all agree we have to say what we think,” she said. “So — who did you vote for? Who do your friends vote for? Are you married? Going through a divorce? Where would we stop?”
Common ground
In the discussion that closed the morning, moderated by Ivan Georgiev, reporter in bTV, the three international speakers converged on a single uncomfortable conclusion: the relationship between journalism and the communities it claims to serve has broken down in ways that better reporting alone cannot fix. Asked whether all journalists are by now advocates, Collins said they are: advocates for free speech, democracy, transparency and accountability. The only real question, he added, is whether journalists are prepared to acknowledge it. Grym added that distrust of mainstream media now comes from both the political left and the political right, for different reasons in each case. Mainstream journalism, she said, is losing public trust from both directions at once.
Pictures: Zdravko Yonchev
