The country 2014 reports on Hungary, Malaysia, Mexico, and Serbia (available under Reports) offer a series of suggestions to expose and reform soft censorship. Several are country-specific, but these eight overarching recommendations address the most salient problems of soft censorship globally:
- Laws and regulations guaranteeing fair and transparent official advertising should be enacted and properly enforced.
- Impartial audience measuring systems based on certified standards should be established to ensure that advertising allocation can be based on technical criteria.
- All state funding for media development and support should be allocated in public competitions on principles of transparent and non-discriminatory state aid under equal conditions for all media.
- All state funding for media development and support should be paid in a transparent manner, with clear audit and reporting rules.
- Laws should provide significant penalties to state bodies and officials violating prohibitions on use of public funds to promote individual or partisan political interests.
- Any state support of content production must be clearly separated from its role as advertiser, with editorial integrity explicitly guaranteed, and be subject to transparent review.
- All broadcast licenses and spectrum allocation should be fully, clearly, and transparently regulated by law, based on objective, clear, public, and democratic criteria.
- Media owners and journalists should adopt clear codes of conduct that ban accepting bribes or any other gifts or compensation that influence coverage.