Romania
Compelling coverage from some mainstream newsrooms and investigative journalism teams mobilised Romanians to vote in presidential and by-elections and also to mount protests against femicide and ‘a captured justice system’. Meanwhile, some other outlets and social media accounts spread disinformation, conspiracy theories, and hate speech, in attempts to influence the election results and pressure the new coalition government.
The possibility that a far-right candidate would win the May 2025 presidential elections increased social anxiety and left some audiences more engaged with news. Media coverage led to stimulated interest and participation in the election, while separate campaigns against issues such as gender-based violence contributed to the adoption of a law against femicide. Journalists meanwhile faced death threats, legal intimidation, smear campaigns, online trolling, and other punitive measures from politicians and members of the judiciary.
Websites such as PressOne, Snoop, Captura, and Recorder published hard-hitting and well-sourced investigations during the year, including one into the far-right, on Romanian mercenaries in Africa, on violence against women, on illegal public works, and on the manipulation of the justice system by the powerful. The two-hour-long documentary Captured Justice, from Recorder (eighth place in our online brand list and largely funded by donations, along with some grants and advertising), reached over 2m views on YouTube in one day. It was subsequently broadcast by the PSB TVR and by B1, a 24-hour TV news channel. Other outlets followed suit, reporting on the often aggressive reactions from the judiciary and politicians to days of public protests demanding change. The 24-hour news channels România TV and Realitatea Plus presented the documentary as a concerted attack on justice by hostile forces, and were subsequently sanctioned by the National Audiovisual Council. Through 2025 both channels received dozens of sanctions from the Council. Following a change in European legislation, the Council also issued hundreds of sanctions for audiovisual content online, in cases ranging from spreading conspiracy theories to hate speech. Our DNR data show that 32% of respondents get content from creators who focus on the news.
Increased usage of online and offline media gave a boost to advertising spending, which reached a record figure of €847m in 2025, excluding political advertising and online-only campaigns.1 In 2025 political parties spent €22.7m from state funding allocated for ‘media and propaganda’, in proportion to their representation. The two major political parties directed a significant part of their subsidies to some news organisations, buying goodwill for their own candidates, with confidentiality clauses to obstruct transparency. However, one encouraging development is that an estimated €4.5m of donations was given by private individuals and companies to support independent news media.
The top online and offline media brands are largely unchanged, but with generally greater weekly usage. Pro TV remains dominant, with a combined news reach online and offline of 60% of DNR survey respondents. It is part of CME, a Czech-owned media company with leading brands in five of its six Central and Eastern European markets. Other foreign owners of top media brands include the Swiss company Ringier (owners of Libertatea – print and online), the Turkish Dogan Media International (Kanal D – generalist TV), and the Czech company Europe Developpement International (Europa FM – radio). Other media brands, such as generalist television Antena 1 (38% combined weekly reach) and Antena 3 CNN, România TV, and Realitatea Plus, Știri pe surse, Adevărul, and HotNews have private Romanian owners. TV news channel Digi24 (38% combined weekly reach) is the only media brand owned by a Romanian publicly traded company.
In 2025, the new parliament named new boards and presidents of the public radio and the public television, following the end of their terms. The Romanian PSBs are two of the five most trusted media brands but are much smaller in terms of reach. Each depends on the state for over 90% of their funding, about €84m p.a. The PSB TVR considers the amount inadequate for all its TV activities.2 TVR has two international channels, five regional studios, and seven national broadcast channels, one of which was closed in March 2026. One controversial change in commercial ownership in 2025 was the acquisition of the digital native G4Media (which started as an investigative and hard news site), by Radu Budeanu, a media owner and former journalist with a past criminal conviction. Budeanu already owns the online news brands Mediafax and Gândul, alongside other mass-market titles and following this latest acquisition now controls the ‘largest digital press conglomerate’ in the Romanian market.3
Raluca-Nicoleta Radu
University of Bucharest
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
15%
(+3)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
47%
(-1)
Trust in news overall
23%
(-3)
Global average: 37%
Trust in news overall reached a new low point, for the fifth year in a row. Nevertheless, both weekly usage and trust in many brands increased. Pro TV has been the most trusted and most used news brand over the last ten years.
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
49/180
Score 67.71
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
