Mali

Mali is a landlocked francophone country in the Sahel, with a population of roughly 22 million, its capital at Bamako and the CFA franc (XOF) as its currency. Following coups in August 2020 and May 2021, the country has been governed by a military-led transitional administration under Général d’Armée Assimi Goïta, who serves as President of the Transition, with Général de Division Abdoulaye Maïga as Prime Minister since November 2024 (retained in a February 2026 reshuffle that maintained the broader cabinet line-up under a revised Transition Charter adopted in 2025).

The defining geopolitical reorientation of the past few years has been the formation of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). Following their joint January 2024 announcement of withdrawal from the Economic Community of West African States, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have moved progressively toward a deeper confederation, holding a second AES summit in Bamako in December 2025. Domestically, the political space narrowed sharply during the review period. The transitional authorities repealed the Charter of Political Parties on 30 April 2025; on 13 May 2025, following pro-democracy protests in Bamako, President Goïta signed a decree dissolving all political parties and “organisations of a political nature,” repealing the laws that had previously governed and protected them. Former Prime Minister Choguel Kokalla Maïga, who led the government from 2021 to 2024, was taken into custody on 12 August 2025 and remanded later that month in connection with alleged misuse of public funds.

State media in Mali fall under the Ministry of Communication, Digital Economy and Modernisation of Administration, currently headed by Alhamdou Ag Ilyène, in post since 2024 and retained in the February 2026 reshuffle, which exercises supervisory authority over both outlets in the SMM dataset and approves their leadership through Council of Ministers decree. Broadcasting licences and frequencies are regulated separately by the Haute Autorité de la Communication (HAC).

The HAC has been an increasingly active instrument of media restriction during the transitional period. Foreign broadcasters Radio France Internationale and France 24 have been indefinitely suspended since 2022; La Chaîne Info (LCI) was suspended for two months in August 2024 over its coverage of alleged military abuses; and TV5Monde was suspended in September 2024 over reporting on a military drone strike and again in May 2025 following its coverage of an opposition protest against the dissolution of political parties. The HAC has also formally instructed Malian media to stop covering the activities of political parties and political associations, and through 2025 it suspended multiple domestic radio stations and arrested journalists in the north of the country.

Mali ranked 121st of 180 in the Reporters Without Borders 2026 World Press Freedom Index, placing it in the “difficult” band, two places lower than in 2025; RSF described the military regimes of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger as severely restricting the press in the name of national security. The risks facing Malian journalists are not confined to the regulatory sphere: on 14 October 2025, Daouda Koné, the director of the state broadcaster’s bureau in Douentza, and his cameraman Salif Sangaré were abducted by jihadist fighters of the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM) between Sévaré and Konna in the Mopti region; the group released a video showing the two men alive in early December 2025, and they were freed on 29 December 2025 after nearly three months in captivity, in circumstances that the transitional authorities did not publicly disclose.

Two state media outlets are tracked in the State Media Monitor dataset for Mali, both added in 2024 and split one apiece between the State-Controlled and Captured Public/State-Managed categories. The distinction between them does not run along ownership lines, both are wholly state-owned and ministerially supervised, but along the line of funding intensity and operational latitude.

Office de Radiodiffusion et de Télévision du Mali (ORTM) — State-Controlled (SC). The national broadcaster, with roots in Radio Soudan (1957) and constituted in its present form in 1992, operates two television channels (ORTM 1, ORTM 2) and three radio stations (Radio Mali, Radio Chaîne 2, Radio Rurale). It is a government public administrative institution (EPA) whose Council of Administration and Director-General are appointed by decree; state subsidy made up approximately 62% of its 2024 budget per State Media Monitor baseline figures. Leadership changed in February 2026 when Yaya Konaté was appointed by the Council of Ministers, succeeding Hassane Baba Diombélé, who had led the broadcaster since February 2021.

Agence Malienne de Presse et de Publicité (AMAP) — Captured Public/State-Managed (CaPu). The state news agency, created by Law No. 79-5/AN-RM in 1979, is also the publisher of the national daily L’Essor and a small portfolio of community-language outlets (Kibaru, Kabaru, Xibaré); it operates through a network of around 50 correspondents or local relays across the country. AMAP’s funding is materially different from ORTM’s: state subsidy accounted for about XOF 548.4 million out of a 2024 budget of XOF 2.3 billion, roughly 24% of total revenue, with commercial revenue from advertising and printing services providing the majority share. Alassane Souleymane was appointed Director-General by the Council of Ministers on 21 August 2024, replacing Bréhima Touré, and was decorated a Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mali by presidential decree in December 2025.

The line between the two classifications turns on funding and operational latitude. ORTM is primarily public-funded, with state subsidy as the majority of its revenue and no commercial-revenue base of any scale to offset that dependence: the configuration of direct state control. AMAP is wholly state-owned and ministerially appointed, but the majority of its budget now comes from commercial activity (advertising, printing services, subscription income from L’Essor), which gives the agency a measure of operational latitude consistent with the captured-public tier rather than direct state control. Neither outlet has any statutory editorial-independence safeguard or independent oversight body.

Both have been openly positioned by the transitional authorities as part of the state’s strategic-communications architecture. At the October 2025 public relaunch of the Agence nationale de presse function housed within AMAP, Minister Ag Ilyène characterised AMAP, ORTM and the Agence nationale de communication pour le développement as “strategic instruments of the State,” and in December 2025 a delegation from Burkina Faso’s state daily Sidwaya visited AMAP and L’Essor during the second AES summit in Bamako for a capacity-sharing exchange explicitly framed around the dissemination of “credible, mobilising and sovereign information”. The AES-framework media coordination took a further step at the same summit, when Goïta, Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traoré and Niger’s Abdourahamane Tiani jointly inaugurated AES Television, a new confederal state broadcaster based in Bamako, which the three governments described as an instrument to counter disinformation and promote a shared Sahelian narrative; the channel was launched on 23 December 2025, with Mali’s president framing it as part of the “information battle” and the alliance’s “media sovereignty.”

Neither outlet has shifted classification since 2024, when both were added to the State Media Monitor dataset. The developments of the review period, a change of Director-General at each outlet within the executive’s appointment power, a further fall in AMAP’s state-subsidy share without any corresponding strengthening of editorial governance, the explicit positioning of both as strategic state instruments, and a tightening of the wider media environment through HAC suspensions and the abrogation of the Charter of Political Parties, reinforce the classifications. The SC classification continues to apply to ORTM and the CaPu classification to AMAP for 2026.

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