Slovakia
Slovakia has a weak public service broadcaster, which successive governments have coveted as an instrument for state broadcasting. De facto, its mandate for democratic public service has, in the past, been assumed by the main commercial channel, Markíza. The country has a polarised press and online news sector with some innovative business models. However, low trust provides fertile ground for parajournalistic challengers.
The 2024 adoption of a controversial law on Slovakia’s rebranded PSB, STVR, switched the appointment of the Director-General (DG) from parliament to a nine-member Council. Dominated by figures loyal to the current government, the Council elected Martina Flašíková as DG in May 2025. Formerly a TV producer and advertising executive, whose father ran ad campaigns for politicians including Robert Fico’s ruling SMER party, Flašíková cancelled several long-running TV and radio shows featuring political discussion, fact-checking, and satire. Political satire is now largely confined to the internet in Slovakia.
Constant format, scheduling, and personnel changes in its political debate shows have characterised STVR and its predecessors since the country’s independence in 1993, preventing the emergence of a strong brand identity that viewers can identify with. To an extent, the same instability afflicts commercial channels. Some TV presenters have tried to establish their own brands online, but only the online TV station 360º, of ex-Markíza presenter Michal Kovačič, has had much impact, with 9% weekly news usage.
In September 2025, the Council of Europe’s (CoE) Platform for the Protection of Journalists raised concerns about governance and funding arrangements at STVR, regretting that the meeting to elect the DG was held behind closed doors, contrary to legal provisions.1 Responding to this ‘systemic alert’, the government claimed the new governance structures at STVR, far from undermining editorial independence as the CoE alleged, ‘ensure objectivity and guarantee a plurality of opinions’, language that reveals how the government views the social role of the news media.
Equating objectivity to ‘pluralistic information’ echoes claims from leading politicians that news is more objective if unorthodox views (e.g. on vaccines or climate change) are included in public debate, and that giving politicians space to present their views without exposure to critical questioning therefore contributes to objectivity. Conversely, when other news media vow to defend liberal democratic values, as Roman Krpelan, the new editor-in-chief at Slovakia’s second-largest daily newspaper SME, has done,2 they become ‘activists’ in the mouths of government politicians, who no longer accept some liberal democratic values (e.g. protection of minorities) as fundamental.
Our survey results show that the largest share of Slovaks say they prefer to get news from a source with no particular point of view rather than one which either shares or challenges their point of view. In practice, following changes at STVR, Slovaks are more critical of the social impact of news from their PSB than any other nation in the DNR except Serbia. The number one complaint is that coverage is influenced by political or other interests, suggesting that the public rejects the government claim that its reforms will restore objectivity. Since the eve of the reform in 2024, STVR’s weekly usage has fallen by 7pp and trust by 10pp.
The 2025 restructuring of Slovakia’s Media Regulator has caused concern. Several new members have connections to the ruling parties SMER and SNS, or to the owner of a commercial TV station.3 One, Rebeka Riabová (who is linked to SNS), criticises excessive ‘censorship’ by social media platforms and once commented that ‘the real disinformers’ are widely used news sites SME, Denník N, and Aktuality.4 The regulator is required to work with the major social media platforms, to create effective mechanisms to enable the removal of illegal or prohibited content. This comes as an international report, Sponsored Hate, found that politicians and political parties in Slovakia (notably SMER) placed more than 500 ads on Meta attacking or discrediting journalists or NGOs between mid-2024 and mid-2025.5
In February 2026 Denník N bought Brussels-based website EUobserver.com, which covers European Union news. The acquisition gives its subscribers access to Slovak translations of EUobserver stories, as well as enabling EUobserver to benefit from Denník N’s technological expertise and use its online subscription system. Elena Sánchez Nicolás, EUobserver’s editor-in-chief, hailed the merger as a way of joining forces to protect ‘independent’ journalism, the founding motto of Denník N.
Commercial TV channel JOJ has begun experimenting with the use of AI avatars to present sport and show-business news, in a bid to attract younger viewers. The newspaper SME, however, has said it will never let AI write its articles.
Andrea Chlebcová Hečková
Constantine the Philosopher University, Nitra
Simon Smith
Charles University, Prague
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
11%
(-1)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
47%
(+5)
Trust in news overall
19%
(-4)
Global average: 37%
The decline in general trust in the news media continued and even accelerated in 2026. For the second year in a row, rolling news channel TA3 was the only one of our 15 surveyed brands seen as trustworthy by more than half of respondents.
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
37/180
Score 72.71
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 https://fom.coe.int/en/alerte/detail/107642814;globalSearch=false
2 https://www.sme.sk/komentare/c/sme-sa-nemeni-doveru-si-chcem-ziskat-pracou
3 https://journalismresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Slovakia-2025-V2.pdf
4 https://dennikn.sk/4926972/koalicia-zvolila-do-medialnej-rady-youtuberku-riabovu-kandidovala-za-sns-obhajuje-dannyho-kollara-a-utocila-na-kuciakov-pamatnik/
5 https://vsquare.org/sponsored-hate-how-politicians-paid-for-meta-ads-to-attack-journalists-slovakia-hungary-czechia-poland-visegrad/