“Solid fact has cracked”: the 2025 UK Media Freedom Forum makes plain how attacks on journalism are affecting democracy

Speakers at the event included exiled journalists Kris Cheng (Hong Kong) and Aliasghar Ramezanpoor (Iran), policymakers like Sir John Whittingdale MP and Baroness Helena Kennedy KC, and representatives from UNESCO, the Council of Europe, Reporters without Borders and more.

The event saw the Council of Europe release its 2024 Europe Press Freedom Report and City St George’s announce the upcoming launch of the Centre for Journalism and Democracy, a new research centre.

“Solid fact has cracked,” says Olga Rudenko from The Kyiv Independent

In March 2025, US President Trump falsely claimed that Ukraine had started the war against Russia. The following day, “who started the war” was the top Google search in the US.

Discussing the result of this was Ukrainian journalist Olga Rudenko, who in 2022 was named one of Times magazine’s next leaders for building the news startup The Kyiv Independent into an international media organisation.

She said:

“Journalists are facing a game of legal whack-a-mole”, says Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC

The Foreign Policy Centre held a talk on strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs), which the British government defines as an abuse of the legal process where the primary objective is to harass, intimidate, silence and financially exhaust opponents.

SLAPPs sometimes take the form of personal attacks on journalists, the goal being to undermine the messenger in order to undermine the message.

Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, barrister at Doughty Street Chambers in Ireland, said:

Examples of SLAPPs include Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, Editor-in-chief of Rappler, being accused of tax evasion and Hong Kong journalist Jimmy Lai spending four years in solitary confinement for “conspiracy”.

“As a public, we lose hours and hours of resources that did not go into original reporting and investigative journalism and instead is invested into running between courts,” explained Dr Ayala Panievsky, Presidential Research Fellow at City St George’s, and author of the forthcoming book The New Censorship.

Speaking out about their experiences being on the receiving end of SLAPPs were Carole Cadwalladr and Barry McCaffrey.

Cadwalladr is an investigative reporter whose work includes investigating the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

She lost a defamation lawsuit from Arron Bank, a multibillionaire businessman and backer of Brexit, about comments she made on the sources of his financial donations and his links to Russia. She is trying to overturn the ruling at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and thanked City St George’s Professor Julie Posetti for her research in this area.

McCaffrey is a senior reporter with Northern Irish paper The Detail and he revealed the police were unlawfully spying on journalists.

FPC thinktank director Susan Coughtrie expressed frustration at the fact that an anti-SLAPP bill was ready to be presented to parliament until the snap election brought it off the agenda.

She also noted the “chilling effect” of potential SLAPPs pushing people away from journalism and following risky lines of enquiry.

Next steps: media literacy education, anti-SLAPPS laws, and National Action Plans

The Council of Europe used the conference to simultaneously launch its Media Freedom in Europe in 2024 report at City St George’s and at a sister event in Brussels.

The report was first launched ten years ago following the terrorist attacks against French newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

The 2024 edition promoted the implementing of anti-SLAPP legislation, called on countries to set out National Action Plans to protect journalists, and highlighted the need for financial support for journalists in exile and stable funding with editorial independence for public service media like the BBC.

Samantha Thompson, media lawyer at the legal firm RPC, said it was encouraging that the UK already has a piece of anti-SLAPP legislation, albeit currently in the context of economic crime.

Renaud Gaudin de Villaine, representing the UN Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHR), believes momentum for anti-SLAPPs legislation is building within in UN bodies like the OCHR, UNESCO and within other coalitions. He pointed towards a UN resolution which was the first to explicitly name SLAPPs.

In his role as Chair of the APPG on Media Freedom, Sir John Whittingdale MP is carrying out an enquiry into online disinformation (particularly from Russia), which he described as “enormous” and “systemic”.

It is affecting electoral processes in countries like Moldova, Georgia, Romania. He noted that there is an active unit in place in France aimed at fact-checking and investigating fake news and misinformation spread by bots online.

He plans to raise the issue of media freedoms, misinformation, and financial support of exiled journalists in upcoming government meetings on foreign office expenditure.

Representing the Council of Europe (CoE), an organisation which provides guidance on protecting the free press and media freedom, Alina Tatarenko discussed their recommendation to promote media literacy.

In Finland, which ranks highest in the world on the Media Literacy Index, she noted that media literacy is taught from kindergarten all the way to higher education, with specialised training for each profession.