Europe has spent years building effective tools to measure media pluralism within its member states. This made sense because newspapers, broadcasters, regulators, ownership structures and public service media were organised within national borders.

But the media environment is changing. News is now distributed through global digital platforms, and its provision is not necessarily mediated by professional journalists. Information is shaped by algorithms, exposed to foreign information manipulation, and increasingly summarised and generated by AI assistants.

The result is a mismatch. Europe faces a plurality of risks to media pluralism that are European in scale, but it still mainly assesses them from national perspectives.

National media systems still matter. Media law, journalists’ safety, ownership, public service media and political pressure vary sharply across countries. Any serious assessment must continue to examine conditions at national level. But if major risk factors operate across borders, through global platforms and AI mediation, Europe also needs to treat them as European risks.

What Europe already has

For more than a decade, the Media Pluralism Monitor (MPM) has provided a common framework for assessing risks to media freedom and pluralism.

This scientific project of the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom at the European University Institute has become a trusted resource for understanding the complex factors that shape the media ecosystem.

Media pluralism is often invoked as a democratic principle, but the Monitor helped turn it into something that can be systematically assessed. It has made risks visible, comparable and politically harder to ignore.

Its value lies not only in the final risk scores, but in the method behind them.

The MPM brings together legal, economic and socio-political evidence through a structured set of indicators, local expert assessment, primary and secondary data, peer review and a transparent risk-scoring methodology. It therefore does more than rank countries. It identifies where risks arise, whether from weak legal safeguards, concentrated market structures, pervasive political interference, polluted online environments or insufficient social inclusion.

This has allowed the MPM to become more than an academic tool. It has created a shared European vocabulary for discussing media pluralism and has entered the EU’s democratic oversight architecture.

Since 2020, the European Commission’s Rule of Law Report has used MPM results in its media pluralism pillar.

Precisely because this framework has been successful, in the present chaotic technological transition, it raises a further question: should Europe continue to assess media pluralism only by looking at national systems?

How the European Media Freedom Act changes the equation

Most provisions of the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) became applicable in August 2025, marking a turning point. The Act recognises that media freedom and pluralism are no longer only national matters.

Its articles set essential conditions in the field of media for a well-functioning internal market and for liberal democracy across the European Union.

If Europe now has a common legal framework for media pluralism and media freedom, it also needs the capacity to assess whether that framework is working at European level.

Article 26 of the EMFA points in this direction, requiring monitoring of media markets, concentration, foreign information manipulation and interference, online platforms, editorial independence and state advertising.

But measuring these only as national phenomena, as the MPM already does year after year, may now be insufficient.

An “EU average” says several important things about general risk across member states. But it does not tell us whether Europeans can access reliable information about EU and global affairs across borders.

It does not show whether language barriers still confine citizens within national silos. Nor does it reveal how platforms or AI interfaces affect the visibility of public-interest journalism. Above all, it does not account for the fact that while media ownership concentration is very high at national level, concentration of digital intermediaries is even higher at national, European and global level.

Finally, it does not capture the full impact of foreign information manipulation and interference. Such interference moves through common digital infrastructures, targets European political debates and exploits the fragmentation of Europe’s information space. These are not national risks repeated 27 times. They are European systemic risks.

What a European media monitor should measure

Europe therefore needs a second layer of monitoring: not a replacement for national assessment, but a key complement.

A European Media Pluralism Monitor should focus on risks that emerge across Europe’s shared news and information space.

It should ask whether citizens can access plural and reliable news about European affairs beyond their domestic media sphere. It should assess whether language barriers are being reduced through translation, subtitling, multilingual publishing and AI tools, or whether they still prevent common debates. It should examine how public-interest journalism, especially about Europe, appears on platforms and AI interfaces.

A European monitor should also measure dependency. Many publishers rely on a few digital intermediaries for traffic, audience reach and advertising revenue. This affects journalism’s sustainability and may disproportionately weaken smaller and local media. Furthermore, the choices made by AI providers when training their models might affect not only the economic sustainability of media by using media content without paying for it, but also content diversity by privileging more widespread languages and larger media markets.

It should also look at mobile EU citizens, border communities and transnational audiences. A citizen living outside her country of origin may not fit neatly into a national media system. The same is true for people in border regions or following politics in more than one language.

Finally, such a monitor should examine whether EU safeguards produce real convergence in practice across member states. Formal compliance is not enough. The question is whether European rules concretely improve journalism and citizens’ access to information.

Measuring the European public sphere

None of this implies that Europe is becoming a single media system. It remains linguistically diverse, politically uneven and institutionally layered.

But that is precisely why an additional and complementary European layer of analysis, coordinated and incorporated within the MPM, is now necessary.

If Europe’s information space is fragmented, asymmetrical and only partially integrated, those features and their evolution should themselves become objects of measurement.

What is not measured is often not governed. With the EMFA, Europe has adopted a common framework for media freedom. But law alone does not guarantee protection. The European Union should now develop the tools to understand whether media pluralism is protected not only within member states, but also whether the conditions for a healthy European public sphere are improving or deteriorating across its shared information space.

The Media Pluralism Monitor is a project co-funded by the European Union.

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Pier Luigi Parcu ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

The most culturally diverse men’s football World Cup in history is taking place in the United States at a time when foreign nationals feel less and less welcome in the country.

The 2026 competition kicks off on 11 June with games in Canada, Mexico, and the US. The US will host by far the largest number of matches, including the championship game. The 2026 cup is also hosting the largest number of competing teams in history – 48.

Over its near century-long history, the competition has remained the premier sporting event, attracting the largest number of travellers. Some spend huge sums of personal savings to be at the matches to cheer on their country and favourite teams.

Held every four years, the International Federation of Association Football (Fifa) World Cup is a mega sporting event that serves as a large avenue for cultural meetings and exchanges.

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The 2022 World Cup in Qatar attracted 1.4 million visitors to a country of slightly over 2 million people. The number of travellers for the 2026 World Cup is expected to drop to 1.2 million due in part to the activities of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Still, the number remains significant.

As a professor of intercultural communication, with decades of research connecting culture to communication, I have found the World Cup of particular interest. The number of global travellers to the World Cup brings with it cultural communication exchanges that cannot be overstated.

Intercultural communication involves contact between people with differing beliefs, values and norms. Cultural communication theorists define such exchanges over a short period as the earliest stages of acculturation, called the honeymoon stage.

It is an important stage of cultural encounter that helps advance social comfort and learning. It eases anxiety in a different cultural environment. These encounters go beyond the stadiums that will host games. They include encounters in neighbourhood stores, transport systems, bars and hotels, among others. Even for those watching remotely.

Matches on the field have the power to rise above the politics of the day and bring cultural unity.

Football and cultural exchange

Cultural encounters at previous World Cups have led to the spread of fan culture across the world. Think of the spread of the stadium wave or use of the vuvuzela, a coloured plastic horn.

The wave involves sections of fans in a stadium standing up by turns. This provides a spectacle that is believed to have spread to most of the world after magnificent wave scenes at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.

At the 2010 World Cup, a South African fan tradition of blowing the vuvuzela spread to the rest of the world. There were vigorous attempts to clamp down on it because it was so noisy. But a few fans have kept the tradition alive.

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Cultural exchange remains a critical aspect of a World Cup. The 2026 event will be no different. While most media reports focus on the vivid exchanges like the wave and vuvuzela, there are others that happen at the interpersonal and small group levels. Those exchanges can be just as long lasting. They include friendships, cultural learning, and the countering of cultural loathing and stereotyping.

How will that work in the US?

The US is a strong location for such cultural exchange. The country has historically accepted the largest number of migrants in the world and the resulting interactions have led to indelible cultural impact over generations. There is, for instance, a large Asian population in the north-west parts of the country and a large Mexican population in the south.

Yet, in 2026, the US has created an unwelcome situation for potential travellers. ICE raids on suspected migrant populations have dominated the news for months. This has an impact on numbers.

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Hotel bookings are far below expectation in 11 US host cities. One report claims there is a booking pace “below expectations, trailing even a typical June or July without any major events”. Human Rights Watch has urged Fifa to pressure the US government to establish an “ICE Truce” during the competition.

An expensive trip

Fans hoping to attend the World Cup are also reportedly concerned about ticket and transport prices. Recently, Fifa’s marketplace, which serves as a resale platform, advertised “four tickets to the final at a cost of $2.3 million each”. While Fifa does not control pricing on its resale site, it takes 15% of the purchase fee from the buyer and 15% from the seller. This means Fifa would make US$690,000 if just one of the tickets sold at that price. It’s a staggering sum for a football match.

Fifa president Gianni Infantino defended the high cost of tickets by claiming it was the cost of doing business in the US market. Yet, such prices are nearly five times higher than the last World Cup in Qatar.

The New Jersey transport system eventually set train roundtrip transport at US$105 after a public outcry after an initial plan to increase the fare to US$150. The fare normally costs US$18.

The high costs and hyper immigration control associated with attending the World Cup in the US are likely responsible for the dampened hotel bookings.

Global broadcasts

There are even concerns with global broadcasts of games. China and India, the two most populated countries in the World Cup, may not often reach the final stages, but they are avid viewers of the games. Neither has access as Fifa has yet to reach TV and digital coverage agreements with providers in those countries. At the 2022 World Cup, the two countries reportedly accounted for 22.6% of total global TV reach. China alone accounted for 49.8% of viewing hours on digital and social platforms. The dispute involves the huge sums Fifa is asking for broadcast rights.

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There are cultural exchanges that the World Cup provides even for those who watch from home in different parts of the world. While not as powerful as cultural learning through in-person contacts, there are still opportunities to learn, depending on the focus of the media coverage.

The men’s World Cup, which celebrates 100 years in 2030 and is co-hosted by an African country (Morocco), remains a key event in fostering cultural understanding and exchange. While the 2026 World Cup will do this, it has also brought to the fore the event’s ability to create division.

Chuka Onwumechili does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.