In Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) 2026 World Press Freedom Index, Albania slipped from 80th to 83rd place out of 180 countries. The debate that followed was mostly about political news. I want to look at the ranking from a narrower but no less important angle: the culture page.

What the index says, and what the government says

According to the country profile on RSF’s website, Albania’s overall score fell from 58.18 to 56.52. The political, legal and social indicators worsened, while the economic indicator improved somewhat, from 147th to 137th place. The organisation describes press freedom in Albania as threatened by conflicts of interest between business and politics, a flawed legal framework and partisan regulation. It notes that ownership of most of the market is concentrated in four or five companies, that state funding is a major source of media revenue but is distributed opaquely, and that self-censorship is widespread.

The government has contested this reading. According to the SafeJournalists network, Prime Minister Edi Rama publicly challenged RSF’s assessment, relying on an AI-based monitoring analysis of more than 106,000 articles which found that opposition voices dominate media coverage and that Albania does not have a captured media environment. This argument deserves to be taken seriously: the opposition’s visibility is a measurable fact, and no index is beyond methodological criticism, as SafeJournalists itself acknowledges. Critics, among them the researcher Blerjana Bino, reply that visibility is not the same as freedom, because media capture concerns ownership, funding and journalists’ safety, not the number of quotations.

There are also steps that RSF itself recognises. After a mission to Tirana in June, the organisation described as progress a 2026 law requiring audiovisual media to disclose their beneficial owners, as well as the fact that 33 outlets have signed up to the Journalism Trust Initiative transparency standard. At the same time, it criticised the January 2026 reform of the Criminal Code, which, in its view, decriminalised defamation only partially and only for journalists categorised as “registered and recognised”, in a country with no registration system for journalists.

The culture page as an indicator

The National Media Freedom Barometer 2024–2025 of the Albanian Helsinki Committee, published in November 2025, offers some figures that say a great deal when read from this angle. In its sample of journalists and media workers who answered the survey, print media accounted for only 4 per cent, while 87.1 per cent of respondents worked from Tirana. Almost half, 46.5 per cent, admitted to having avoided reporting a story for fear of a superior, and 51.5 per cent believed the quality of reporting had worsened.

The barometer does not measure cultural journalism specifically, and I do not want to give the figures a meaning they do not have. But they describe the environment in which it lives. For decades, literary criticism, the book review and the long interview with a writer found shelter mainly in newspapers and their supplements. When print occupies such a small share of the profession and journalism is concentrated in the capital, the space for an independent review of a book published in Shkodër, Korçë or Prishtina naturally narrows.

When the media owner is also a party

Concentrated ownership has a particular consequence for culture. RSF notes that the most influential private media belong to a handful of companies with links to the political world and interests in highly regulated sectors such as construction. Cultural criticism often deals precisely with the city: a demolished theatre, a historic building, an urban project on a protected coastline. When a newspaper’s owner has interests in the same city, the critic knows, without anyone saying so, which subjects are the most dangerous. The self-censorship the barometer measures in political news has no reason to stop at the door of the culture desk.

This does not mean cultural journalism in Albania has ceased to exist. It continues in small magazines, specialised portals, radio programmes and the work of a number of journalists who pursue it with persistence. But much of it survives without a sustainable business model, as, according to RSF, do most of the country’s hundreds of online outlets.

What a cultural review can do

I believe cultural media cannot solve the problems of ownership or public funding on their own, but they can do two things. The first is transparency about themselves. This review is published by the Pilo Zyba Publishing House, and readers have a right to know that whenever we write about books, publishers or literary prizes. The second is a clear separation between review and promotion, in a market where, according to the barometer, 42.6 per cent of journalists say they have been told to publish ready-made material without checking it.

The debate over RSF’s ranking will continue, and it is good that it does. For the reader of culture, the practical question is simpler: can one read today, in Albanian, a harsh review of a book, a play or a public project without wondering who paid for it? The more often the answer is yes, the less we will need indices to measure freedom in our country.

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