Euronews
Euronews (styled euronews) is a European television news network, headquartered in Brussels, Belgium.[1] It is a provider of livestreamed news, which can be viewed in Europe and North Africa via satellite, and in most of the world via its website, on YouTube, and on various mobile devices and digital media players.
Country
Countries of Europe
Europe
International
Various (see § Language availability)
1 January 1993
- Euronews website livestream (except in Turkey, Singapore, China, Cuba, and North Korea)
- Plex livestream (worldwide)
The network began broadcasting on 1 January 1993 and covers world news from a European perspective. In 2022 the network was bought by a company linked to Viktor Orbán's government. The acquisition was partly financed by funds from the Hungarian state.[2][3]
Since 2018, Euronews has begun licensing its name to various private and public broadcasters and organisations in southern, central and eastern Europe, agreeing to set up localized Euronews channels broadcasting regional, national, European and international news in local languages. The first of these channels was the launch of Euronews Albania.
In 2019, Euronews launched its first franchise through a joint venture with local RTV In in Albania. The new channel, known as Euronews Albania, is based in Tirana, Albania and covers the Western Balkans countries of Albania, Montenegro, Kosovo and North Macedonia.[65]
In 2021, Euronews signed a partnership with TV Europa to launch a channel in Bulgarian.[66][67] The new channel started broadcasting on 5 May 2022.[68]
In 2019, Euronews signed a deal with local telecommunications company Silknet to launch a channel in Georgian.[66][69] The new channel began broadcasting on 31 August 2020.[70]
In 2021, Euronews teamed up with the Politehnica University of Bucharest to launch a channel in Romanian.[66][71] The new channel started broadcasting on 25 May 2022,[72] and also covers the Republic of Moldova.[73]
In 2019, Euronews teamed up with the media group HD-WIN, owned by the state-owned Telekom Srbija, to launch a channel in Serbian. The new channel started broadcasting on 3 June 2021.[74][75]
Company type
1992
- Guillaume Dubois
(Publication Director)[94]
Euronews
- Alpac Capital (97,6%)
- IMI (Abu Dhabi)
- SNRT (Morocco)
- PBS (Malta)
Reception[edit]
Belarus[edit]
In April 2021, the Ministry of Information of Belarus announced that authorities had ceased broadcasting of Euronews within its territory, with its frequencies being taken over by Channel One Russia's Pobeda channel. A ministry spokesperson said that the channel had "violated legislation by running advertisements in English, instead of Russian or Belarusian".[102][103] In a statement, the network responded that they were not "notified of this decision nor of the reasons for it, and learned of it this morning through the press", adding that it "deeply regret[ed] the decision".[103] A Minsk-based expert assessed that the move deprived Belarusians of an alternative "to what is being broadcast by Belarusian state media and Russian television channels".[102]
Russia[edit]
In May 2016, Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova accused Euronews of "disinformation" after an online article mistakenly embedded a tweet from a parody account claiming to be foreign minister Sergey Lavrov.[104][105] Pyotr Fedorov, a member of the Euronews supervisory board representing the Russian state broadcaster VGTRK, referred to the incident as an "unconscious Russophobia characteristic" of English-language journalists.[106]
An October 2016 report broadcast on Russia-1 and produced by correspondent and propagandist Evgeniy Poddubny accused Euronews of producing an "anti-Russian fake about Syria" in the context of the Syrian army offensive during the Battle of Aleppo.[107]
Access to Euronews in Russia, including its online services, was restricted on orders of Roskomnadzor in late March 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[108] The channel's signal was then forcibly taken over by Russia-24, before the original frequencies were in turn handed over on 7 April to a new channel operated by state TV journalist Vladimir Solovyov, who was sanctioned by the European Union for his support of the invasion of Ukraine.[109]
Ukraine[edit]
On 14 August 2014, Ukrainian journalist Olha Herasymyuk, then-deputy chairperson of the National Council of Television and Radio Broadcasting of Ukraine, described the Russian-language service of Euronews as having "a propagandistic nature" due to the fact that Russian journalists worked on it.[110]
An online report published by the English-language edition of Euronews in 2018, which depicted children in Russian-annexed Crimea being trained by soldiers to defuse landmines, was criticised by Ukrainian media, as well as Mykola Tochytskyi, Ukraine's representative to the EU.[111][112] Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesperson Mariana Betsa, in response to the article, added that reporting "should be based on facts".[113] Lithuanian foreign minister Linas Antanas Linkevičius called the report "brainwashing".[111]
Liubov Tsybulska, then-chair of the Centre for Strategic Communication and Information Security, said in 2021 that the "influence of the Kremlin on the supposedly neutral channel is visible not only in Euronews's Russian material, but also in the approach to the presentation of English-language news".[114]
During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the National Council of Television and Radio Broadcasting of Ukraine appealed to Euronews leadership in June 2022, accusing the network of promoting a pro-Kremlin narrative in its Russian-language broadcasts.[115] In a letter sent to the National Council in response, CEO Guillaume Dubois said it was "unfair that one aspect would be extracted out of the overall rolling coverage to accuse our newsroom of promoting Kremlin narratives", and expressed his "full solidarity" with Ukraine.[116]
