Bulgaria
The Bulgarian media landscape is characterised by entrenched issues like political interference and very low public trust, set against a backdrop of deep political instability. The government’s 2025 resignation paved the way for yet another snap election in 2026, defined by the emergence of Progressive Bulgaria, a centre-left coalition headed by former President Rumen Radev.
On 1 January 2026, Bulgaria became the 21st member of the eurozone, completing a final symbolic milestone of integration with the EU. However, the process has been marred by public scepticism and disinformation about the impact of the euro. Political turmoil and instability continued, with mass anti-corruption protests, dubbed the ‘Gen Z protests’, leading to the collapse of the government in December 2025. The protests, which quickly spread across the country, were joined by thousands of young Bulgarians demanding action against endemic corruption. Bulgaria’s ranking in the Corruption Perceptions Index has declined for the second consecutive year, falling three places to 84th out of 182 countries, making it one of the EU’s lowest-scoring countries.1
The political landscape in Bulgaria experienced a significant shift in January with the decision of President Rumen Radev to give up his mainly ceremonial role and enter party politics. The largely popular, pro-Russian former air force commander created a new three-party coalition, Progressive Bulgaria, which won a parliamentary majority in the April 2026 elections. As a Eurosceptic favouring a closer relationship with Russia and opposing military support to Ukraine, Radev’s victory could change Bulgaria’s foreign policy over time. Radev campaigned with promises to combat corruption and end years of political instability.
Bulgaria has made little progress in fulfilling its EU obligation to implement the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), which came into full force in 2025.2 Issues such as political pressure on journalists and public service media, limited pluralism, and non-transparent ownership still plague the Bulgarian media landscape and legislative reforms have been delayed.
Bulgarian media are operating in a climate of hostility from politicians and the public. Journalists from Nova TV were assaulted while reporting on a protest in the town of Sopot, organised by the nationalist Eurosceptic party Vazrazhdane during a visit by the EC President Ursula von der Leyen. Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP) cases are regularly used by politicians and officials to silence journalists. A prime example is the case of the investigative journalist Boris Mitov and the independent news outlet Mediapool who were convicted by the Supreme Court of Cassation and fined over €20,000 for defamation of a senior judge. Mitov’s long-running legal battle relates to his 2018 factually accurate reporting on a magistrate’s professional background and personal wealth.3
The removal in December of a journalist from bTV, Maria Tsantsarova, host of the popular morning talk show, along with her co-host Zlatimir Yochev, sparked protests in support of the journalists outside bTV’s offices. Tsantsarova, a prominent, sometimes outspoken, journalist, was fired from bTV for allegedly violating editorial standards, an act she described as one of political censorship.4
The use of major news brands in Bulgaria remains largely unchanged across both traditional and online platforms. The leading broadcasters – Nova TV News, owned by Nova Broadcasting Group, and bTV news, owned by bTV group – retain their dominant market positions and continue to account for over 90% of total advertising budgets. 24 Chasa remains leader in the relatively stable print market. Despite introducing paid digital subscriptions, Dnevnik and Capital (Economedia AD) have recorded growth in online use. Capital is one of the very few traditional outlets creating content tailored for younger readers. Bulgaria no longer leads in news avoidance (60%), while more citizens turn towards AI chatbots for daily news.
Journalists and veteran creators, such as Martin Karbowski, Stanislav Tsanov, Yavor Dachkov, Mirolyuba Benatova, and Genka Shikerova, continue to be popular in the digital space, commanding large YouTube followings for their takes on current affairs, but new Gen Z influencers and content creators have seen a significant rise in popularity among younger audiences. Flora Stratieva (over 267,000 TikTok followers and 122,000 YouTube subscribers), Andrea Banda Banda (97,000 Instagram followers), and Mimi Shishkova (50,000 followers) are among other established vloggers and artists who helped mobilise support for the protests among young people in late 2025. ‘You pissed off the wrong generation’ and ‘Give us a reason to stay’ became two of the defining slogans that trended as hashtags across TikTok and Instagram. Drone footage on social media was widely used to show the scale of the young crowds to counter official government numbers.
Lada T. Price
University of Sheffield, UK
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Methodology note
We introduced education quotas in 2023 to make data more representative of national populations. Part of the declines in reach in the source chart between 2022 and 2023 will be because there are more people with lower levels of education in our sample, who typically have lower interest in news.
Pay for online news
9%
(-)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
60%
(-3)
Trust in news overall
21%
(-5)
Global average: 37%
Trust in Bulgarian news hit a low of 21% in 2026. Traditional broadcast media faced heavy criticism for their coverage of the protests, political bias, firing of prominent journalists, and neglecting younger audiences. PSBs BNT and BNR remain most trusted, ahead of the more widely used private channels bTV News and Nova News.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
71/180
Score 60.28
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/bulgaria
2 https://ipi.media/bulgaria-media-capture-monitoring-report-2025/
3 https://rsf.org/en/bulgaria-rsf-condemns-conviction-journalist-boris-mitov-slapp-case
4 https://europeanjournalists.org/blog/2025/12/22/bulgaria-top-tv-anchor-taken-off-air-amid-political-interference/#:~:text=