Honduras
MAPPED
CONTROLLED
STATE-FUNDED
Honduras enters the 2026 State Media Monitor cycle in the middle of a sharp political transition, and its state-media architecture illustrates how a state-controlled public-communications system can pass intact from one government to the next. The State Media Monitor maps six Honduran outlets: five are State-Controlled (SC) and one, the channel of the National Autonomous University of Honduras, is Independent State-Funded (ISF). There is no Captured Public or Captured Private outlet in the mapping; Honduras’s state media are, with the single university exception, owned and run directly by state institutions, with no arm’s-length public-service layer to capture.
The defining event of the cycle is the change of government. The right-wing National Party candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura won the 30 November 2025 general election by a narrow margin and was inaugurated on 27 January 2026, ending the 2022–2026 government of Xiomara Castro and her left-wing Libre party. The transition did not loosen the state’s grip on its media; it transferred institutional control to a new administration. Executive-controlled outlets moved under the Asfura government’s communications structure, while the legislative and military channels passed to the new congressional leadership and defense command. This is the central finding for Honduras in 2026: the country’s state media are structured so that control follows whoever holds power, and the classification rests on that institutional structure rather than on the politics of any single administration.
What distinguishes Honduras is that its State-Controlled outlets are distributed across several state institutions rather than concentrated in the presidency alone: the executive, the legislature and the Armed Forces / Defense Secretariat.
The executive’s outlets are the largest cluster. Televisión Nacional de Honduras (TNH / Canal 8) and Radio Nacional de Honduras (RNH) are the state television and radio broadcasters, run directly under the presidency’s communications structure, while Poder Popular was the state newspaper. All three were historically attached to Casa Presidencial and, during the Castro government, were administratively placed under the Secretariat of Strategic Planning (Seplan). The legislature runs its own channel, Canal del Congreso Nacional (Canal 20), an organ of the National Congress that broadcasts legislative proceedings. The military runs Fuerzas Armadas TV, owned by the Secretariat of National Defense and formally declared a channel of the State of Honduras by executive decree. Each of these outlets is owned by a state institution, lacks an independent board or competitive appointment process, depends on public funding, and has no statutory safeguard for editorial autonomy, the defining features of State-Controlled status.
The 2026 restructuring reshaped this architecture without changing its character. As part of a wider state-shrinking programme, the Asfura government moved to suppress the Secretariat of Strategic Planning that had housed the executive’s media, and the incoming state-media director announced the closure of the print edition of Poder Popular, citing its monthly running cost, with an announced digital-only successor, the Diario Nacional de Honduras. State-media staffing was cut sharply. These are structural and administrative changes to how the executive’s outlets are organised and funded; they did not alter the outlets’ typology or introduce any independent governance.
The one Honduran outlet not classified State-Controlled is the television channel of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH), long known as UTV and relaunched in 2024–2025 as TV UNAH. It is mapped Independent State-Funded because it is publicly funded but not controlled by the government: it is owned and operated by a constitutionally autonomous public university, governed within the university rather than by the executive or the legislature. Its funding flows through the university as a constitutional entitlement (Article 161 mandates an allocation of no less than six per cent of net national revenue) rather than as a discretionary government media budget, and the university’s relationship with the state over that funding is openly adversarial, the university publicly campaigns against successive governments, including the Asfura administration, to secure its mandated budget. The qualification on this classification is that the channel’s independence is from government, not from its parent university, of which it is an institutional outlet; on that basis, the ISF classification holds. This makes Honduras comparable to other Central American countries where a constitutionally autonomous public university provides the lone independent voice in an otherwise state-dominated landscape.
Honduras ranks 132nd of 180 in the 2026 RSF World Press Freedom Index, with a score of 41.02, placing it in the “difficult” band. That represents an improvement of roughly ten places in the ranking from the previous year, but the gain should be read with care: RSF and local press-freedom groups stress that the structural problems facing Honduran journalism, including defamation suits, impunity for crimes against journalists, and violence and intimidation, persist regardless of the ranking movement, and the improvement reflects the wider regional and methodological picture as much as concrete domestic reform. During the 2025 general-election campaign, international monitoring by the European Union Election Observation Mission found that the state broadcasters TNH and RNH aired almost exclusively government propaganda free of charge, an illustration of how the state-media system functions during contested periods. Among the main Central American comparator cases in this mapping, Honduras sits in the middle of a clear spectrum.
The most consequential question for the next cycle is whether the Asfura government’s restructuring of the executive’s media changes anything beyond their administrative housing. The dissolution of Seplan and the closure of the print Poder Popular are real changes, but on current evidence they reorganise the state-media system rather than open it up: the announced digital successor would carry the same State-Controlled character, and no independent governance or editorial safeguard has been introduced. The university channel remains the structural exception, and its independence will continue to depend on the autonomy of UNAH and on the outcome of the recurring budget conflict between the university and the state. The Diario Nacional de Honduras, announced as Poder Popular’s digital replacement, is a watch item for future mapping once it is confirmed operational.