Government press

Algeria’s state sector includes a group of national newspapers that operate as public-press titles under the tutelage of the Ministry of Communication. This profile covers four of them: El Moudjahid, the French-language government flagship daily; Ech Chaab and El Djoumhouria, Arabic-language dailies; and Horizons, a French-language daily originally launched with a younger general readership in mind. Each retains its own identity and readership, but all sit within the same publicly owned press economy and function as platforms for official messaging.

El Moudjahid is the doyen of Algeria’s French-language public press. The current post-independence daily dates to 22 June 1965 and takes its name from the National Liberation Front’s wartime newspaper of the independence era. It is published by the state-owned EPE-SPA El Moudjahid and devotes substantial space to presidential, government and diplomatic activity.

Ech Chaab, Arabic for “The People,” is an Arabic-language general daily founded on 11 December 1962, shortly after independence. El Djoumhouria, Arabic for “The Republic,” is an Oran-based Arabic daily whose institutional lineage runs back to colonial-era Oran press later nationalised and renamed by the Algerian state. Horizons, founded on 1 October 1985 under the name Horizons 2000, is a French-language public daily that later evolved into the current Horizons title. All four are part of Algeria’s public written-press sector.

Media assets

Publishing: El Moudjahid, Ech Chaab, El Djoumhouria, Horizons

Ownership and governance

The four titles are published by state-owned press companies under the tutelage of the Ministry of Communication, currently headed by Zoheir Bouamama. Their directors-general are appointed by the supervising authorities, a mechanism that places senior editorial leadership within the state’s sphere of control.

Recent appointments illustrate the pattern. At El Moudjahid, Brahim Takheroubte was named director-general in January 2024 by then-Minister of Communication Mohamed Laagab, following changes at the top of the newspaper. At El Djoumhouria, Leila Zerguit was installed as director-general in April 2024. At Ech Chaab, Djamel Laâlami was appointed director-general in 2022. At Horizons, Nadia Kerraz was installed as director of the newspaper in September 2022. These outlets function as official platforms for government messaging and are firmly embedded within Algeria’s public-sector press economy.

Source of funding and budget

The public newspapers operate on a hybrid model, generating advertising and sales revenue while relying on substantial state support. Financial figures are closely held. Observers consulted for SMM’s reporting indicate that the titles received direct government allocations on the order of tens of millions of dinars in 2022, with earlier SMM reporting citing around DZD 32m in direct allocations to the public print titles that year. SMM-retained estimates also indicate that print runs remain modest by historic standards, including estimated runs in the low tens of thousands for the leading public titles. These figures are not treated as audited public disclosures.

The decisive funding lever, however, sits in public-sector advertising. The Agence nationale d’édition et de publicité (ANEP), created in 1967 and operating as the central state advertising agency, channels public advertising through the press economy; ANEP appears in the mastheads of public newspapers as their advertising agent. During the current cycle, ANEP became the focus of significant controversy. In October 2025, members of parliament questioned the Minister of Communication over what they described as opaque and discretionary distribution of public advertising, warning that it threatened the economic survival and editorial independence of media outlets. A series of corruption trials over the historical management of public advertising also resulted in convictions of former officials, including former communication-sector officials. The minister defended ANEP’s criteria while undertaking to update the rules for distributing public advertising.

For the public-press titles, dependence on this state-controlled advertising stream, alongside direct subsidy, is the core mechanism underpinning their captured-public status.

Editorial independence

The four titles maintain a consistently pro-government editorial stance and serve as conduits for official viewpoints and policy, with limited space for critical or investigative reporting. A content review conducted by the Media and Journalism Research Center (MJRC) between January and mid-February 2024 found overwhelmingly favourable coverage of state priorities and little room for independent perspectives.

No statutory safeguards protect editorial autonomy in Algeria’s public print media, and no independent oversight body exists to insulate editorial decisions from political influence. Based on SMM-retained interviews, journalists at these outlets operate within unspoken political limits, and self-censorship is widely reported.

These conditions sit within a press environment that tightened after Algeria’s 2023 media-law package, which restricts foreign funding for Algerian media, reorganises media-regulatory structures and creates additional legal pressure points for journalists and publishers. SMM did not identify any legal or governance reform during the cycle that would establish editorial independence for the public-press titles.

AI and digital policy

SMM found no evidence that any of the four titles has published a dedicated public AI governance or editorial-use policy as of mid-2026.

All four maintain active news websites, and some have expanded digital output through multimedia, PDF editions, social-media distribution or multilingual web sections. Their digital operations, however, remain extensions of the public-press titles rather than independently governed platforms. SMM identified no title-specific framework governing the use of AI in editorial production, verification, attribution, recommendation systems, audience analytics, synthetic-media labelling, content disclosure or human editorial oversight.

Classification rationale

El Moudjahid, Ech Chaab, El Djoumhouria and Horizons are classified as Captured Public/State-Managed Media (CaPu), a classification maintained from prior SMM cycles, and from 2023 for Horizons, which entered the database that year. They are publicly owned press titles under the tutelage of the Ministry of Communication, their senior management is appointed by the authorities, and their finances depend on public subsidy and state-channelled advertising through ANEP.

They operate as functioning editorial publications rather than direct organs of a single state body, which places them in the captured-public category rather than the State-Controlled category. Developments during the cycle, including leadership changes, digital activity and the ANEP advertising controversy, reinforced rather than altered these determinants. All four therefore remain in the CaPu category for 2026.

June 2026