TIRANA/BRUSSELS (BV)— Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said Albania’s media environment cannot be described as “captured,” pointing to an AI-generated analysis that, according to him, shows opposition parties receive significantly more visibility than the government in national media coverage.
In a public message addressed to Reporters Without Borders (RSF) before departing for Brussels for another step in Albania’s European Union accession process, Rama said media reform remains “an essential part” of the country’s EU path and pledged continued cooperation with the bloc on the issue.
However, he criticized what he described as persistent claims about a government-controlled media environment in Albania.
Rama said the findings were based on an expanded monitoring period of 120 days covering 106,962 articles published by 47 monitored media outlets.
According to the report cited by the Albanian leader, opposition parties accounted for 68.2% of media visibility, while government visibility stood at 31.8%.
Rama also claimed that even media outlets frequently labeled as “pro-government” gave greater visibility to opposition voices than to government representatives.
“Criticism of the government outweighs positive coverage by nearly five to one,” Rama wrote on X.
“Hardly the profile of a country where criticism is silenced, opposition voices are marginalized, or media pluralism is merely decorative,” he added.
The Albanian prime minister argued that the larger the sample size becomes, “the weaker” the thesis of a structurally captured media system appears.
He said the empirical indicators placed Albania “33 percentage points below the threshold associated with structurally captured media systems.”
“These are not perceptions. They are measurable facts,” Rama said, adding that the findings were derived from more than 106,000 published articles.
Rama said he would continue sharing future findings “in the spirit of mutual respect, constructive cooperation, and our shared commitment” to what he called “The Truth.”
The statement comes as Albania seeks to accelerate accession talks with the European Union, where media freedom, judicial reform and democratic standards remain among the key benchmarks for membership progress.