On the 25th of April, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published their World Press Freedom Index for 2018. Europe hasn’t escaped the global trend of “growing animosity towards journalists”, condemned by the Paris-based NGO.

RSF suggest an all too real “erosion of the European model”. In the report which accompanies the index, we read that “verbal violence from politicians against the media is also on the rise in Europe, although it is the region that respects press freedom most.” It is in Europe, the geographical region where press freedom is least threatened, that the index has most significantly worsened.

“Of the five countries where press freedom has most significantly worsened in the 2018 ranking, four are in Europe: Malta (65th place, 18 places lower than in 2017), the Czech Republic (34, -11), Serbia (76, -10) and Slovakia (27, -10). In the Czech Republic, president Miloš Zeman turned up to a press conference armed with a kalashnikov inscribed with the words, ‘for journalists’. In Slovakia, Robert Fico, prime minister up until March 2018, referred to journalists as ‘dirty anti-slovak prostitutes’ and ‘idiotic hyenas’. One journalist, Ján Kuciak, was assassinated in February in the central European country, after the death of Daphne Caruana Galizia in a car-bomb attack in Malta”, the report recalls.

Hungary (73, -2) follows the same trend: prime minister Viktor Orbán declared American billionaire George Soros public