Covering Authoritarianism Next Door: European Media and the Challenges of Reporting on Democratic Backsliding in Eastern Europe

How do European media cover authoritarianism in Eastern Europe, and what challenges do journalists face when reporting on democratic backsliding in the region? This paper addresses these questions in two steps: a quantitative content analysis and qualitative interviews with media professionals. Building on research conducted for a collective volume on the 2024–2025 Serbian protests (edited by Florian Bieber, Gazela Pudar Draško, and Vujo Ilić), we first present findings from a quantitative framing analysis (Entman, 2007; Cacciatore, Scheufele and Iyengar, 2016) of 951 press articles published in France, Germany, Ireland, and Romania, selected to represent distinct media systems (Hallin and Mancini, 2004), between November 2024 and September 2025. Our analysis reveals that international coverage of Serbia's student-led protests remained sporadic and often decontextualised, rarely situating the movement within the broader dynamics of authoritarian regime consolidation. While Romanian media provided sustained attention, French, German, and Irish outlets provided only intermittent coverage. Across all four countries, neutral framing conventions tended to obscure the repressive nature of the Serbian regime, effectively mirroring the European Union's stabilitocratic approach to the Western Balkans (Bieber, 2018; Kelemen, 2017; Bozóki and Hegedűs, 2018). The paper then moves beyond the Serbian case study to interrogate the challenges that journalists face when covering authoritarianism in Eastern Europe more broadly. Drawing on interviews with media professionals from Romania, Poland, Hungary, and Serbia, we explore two dimensions of the problem. First, we examine how international correspondents and outlets covering the region from the outside rely heavily on press agency reports and official governmental sources, often reproducing institutional framings that lack the context necessary to convey the reality of democratic erosion. We support this claim with cosine similarity analysis comparing wire agency content (Agerpres) against the ten most prominent Romanian media outlets, measuring the degree to which journalistic output mirrors agency-produced material. Second, we foreground the experiences of journalists working within these contexts, where independent and investigative outlets produce critical reporting on authoritarian practices under significant professional and political pressure, whose work remains largely invisible to international audiences and has limited impact beyond the region. By combining content analysis with practitioner perspectives, this paper provides empirical evidence of how media framing can inadvertently legitimise authoritarian regimes by normalising their practices through balanced reporting conventions. It also reveals a structural disconnect in the European media landscape: the journalists best positioned to report on democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe are those whose work reaches the fewest international readers. In doing so, the paper bridges media studies and comparative politics, connecting the literature on authoritarian legitimation with scholarship on journalism in illiberal and semi-peripheral contexts.