Tunisia
Tunisia entered the post-2011 decade as the Arab world’s most promising media reform story, with a 2011 legal framework, Decree-Laws 115 and 116, that sought to safeguard press and audiovisual freedoms and created an independent broadcast regulator, the Haute Autorité indépendante de la communication audiovisuelle (HAICA). That trajectory has since reversed. Since President Kais Saied invoked his exceptional measures in July 2021 and consolidated executive power, the institutional checks built after the revolution have been hollowed out. HAICA has been left without a normally renewed and fully functioning leadership structure since 2023, its institutional capacity has been weakened by government measures including the freezing of certain members’ salaries, and a draft law to reform the broadcasting sector has prolonged uncertainty around the regulatory framework. The regulator that once provided an independent check on public-broadcaster appointments no longer operates effectively in that role.
The defining instrument of the current period is Decree-Law No. 2022-54 on cyber-offences, used to prosecute journalists, commentators and critics for “false news” and related speech offences. Prosecutions and custodial sentences under it have continued through 2026, alongside a widening set of tactics documented by press-freedom groups, including financial-crime charges, administrative restrictions, banking freezes and dissolution or suspension proceedings against independent media outlets and civil-society organisations. Saied has publicly called on public media to enlist in what he terms a “war of national liberation,” and the state has moved to consolidate the public sector. In December 2025, the government authorised the merger by absorption of the confiscated Dar Assabah group into the state publisher SNIPE-La Presse, building a single state-managed print pole. Reporters Without Borders ranked Tunisia 137th of 180 countries in its 2026 World Press Freedom Index, down from 129th in 2025, with a score of 40.43, placing the country in the “difficult” category and citing political pressure, legal threats and the instrumentalisation of the justice system against critical journalism.
SMM maps four Tunisian state-linked outlets, unchanged in their classifications for 2026. Three are State-Controlled (SC): the Établissement de la Télévision Tunisienne (ETT), the Établissement de la Radio Tunisienne (ERT), and the official news agency Tunis Afrique Presse (TAP). All three are publicly owned, predominantly state-funded, and run by chief executives appointed and removed through executive decision, with no functioning regulatory check and with editorial output subject to direct executive pressure. The fourth outlet, the state publisher SNIPE-La Presse, is classified Captured Public/State-Managed Media (CaPu): it is effectively wholly publicly owned and dependent on state support, but its commercial shareholding-company form and own revenue base place it in the captured-public rather than state-controlled category.
The architecture is a single-authority system. Every outlet answers ultimately to the executive, through the Presidency of the Government or direct presidential decision, rather than to any independent public-service governance framework. The distinction between the SC broadcasters and agency on one side and the CaPu publisher on the other turns on corporate form and funding base, not on any meaningful difference in editorial independence, since none of the four enjoys an effective statutory safeguard for editorial autonomy. The 2026 developments, HAICA’s continued paralysis, the SNIPE-Dar Assabah consolidation, and the ongoing Decree-Law 54 prosecutions, deepened state control across the sector rather than altering any outlet’s typology.