Malaysia

Malaysia is a federal constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy with a competitive commercial media market, an active civil society and a government that retains substantial legal powers over publishing and broadcasting. RSF ranks the country 95th of 180 in 2026 with a score of 52.73, down from 88th and 56.09 in 2025, with the economic indicator falling most sharply, from 48.67 to 40.28.

State Media Monitor maps two organisations in Malaysia, and from this cycle they carry different classifications.

• Radio Televisyen Malaysia (RTM), the national broadcaster, classified State-Controlled (SC).
• BERNAMA, the national news agency, reclassified Captured Public (CaPu).

The divergence is the country’s organising finding, and it turns on institutional form rather than on editorial conduct, which is broadly similar at both.

RTM is not a public broadcaster in the institutional sense. It is the Department of Broadcasting Malaysia, a federal government department under the Ministry of Communications, with no separate legal personality, no governing board and no charter. Its funding position makes this concrete: the Federal Expenditure Estimates for 2026 record RM472,847,800 for activity 020500, Penyiaran (RTM), against 4,305 established federal positions, with roughly RM151 million more across eleven RTM development project lines. RTM appears there as an activity within Programme 2, “Strategic Communication and Creative Industry”, alongside the Department of Information and BERNAMA. Separately, the Ministry’s overall Outcome 2 framework reports a 2024 result of 91.20% for the effectiveness of government-information delivery in grassroots nationhood-engagement programmes, against a 90% target. The estimates therefore place RTM institutionally within the ministry’s strategic-communication architecture, although that particular performance indicator is not attributed specifically to RTM.

The clearer evidence of RTM’s function comes from the broadcaster itself. Its Broadcasting Code of Ethics, whose stated scope covers journalists, newsreaders and presenters as well as producers, directors and programme suppliers, identifies RTM as a government broadcasting channel, requires production to take account of prevailing government policies and frames programming as carrying government messages.

BERNAMA is constituted differently. It is a statutory body under the BERNAMA Act 1967 (Act 780, revised 2016), managed by a Board of Governors that includes representatives of subscribing media organisations, and overseen by a separate five-member Supervisory Council chaired by a serving High Court judge with jurisdiction over subscriber complaints. The BERNAMA (Amendment) Act 2025 (Act A1762) expanded the statutory conception of participating media organisations to electronic and digital media. Its 2026 federal grant of RM72,602,300, recorded as a single grant line with no federal establishment posts, sits alongside substantial commercial income: audited accounts for 2022 report total revenue of approximately RM120.78 million against an operating grant of RM55.52 million, roughly 46%, below the Matrix’s 50% threshold for predominant state funding. BERNAMA publishes audited financial statements, which are tabled before Parliament and subject to Auditor-General review.

That combination places BERNAMA in Captured Public territory: a publicly constituted institution with formal safeguards and a genuine commercial revenue base, whose editorial independence is nonetheless compromised in practice. SMM identified no published case in which the Supervisory Council has intervened to protect newsroom independence, and interviews conducted for SMM in early 2024 and May 2025 describe output generally favourable to the government. RTM, by contrast, has no arm’s-length institutional layer that could be captured, which is what keeps it at the State-Controlled end.

Leadership at both organisations changed or was renewed during the cycle. RTM’s Director-General since 23 February 2026 is Ashwad Ismail, previously Editor-in-Chief of Astro Awani; his predecessor came from the same commercial broadcaster. BERNAMA’s Chief Executive Officer, Nur-ul Afida Kamaludin, was appointed in February 2024 after serving as Editor-in-Chief, having built her career at the agency, and Wong Chun Wai was reappointed Chairman of the Board of Governors alongside Justice Azhar Abdul Hamid as President of the Supervisory Council, both for terms running to August 2027. The current leaders of both mapped organisations have professional media backgrounds rather than administrative ones. That does not alter the appointment mechanisms at either organisation: RTM’s Director-General is a senior federal appointment without statutory protected tenure, while BERNAMA’s Board members are formally appointed by the Yang di-Pertuan Agong within a statutory structure providing both for government representation and for representatives nominated or recommended by subscribing media organisations.

The most significant national development of the cycle sits outside both organisations. The Malaysian Media Council Bill was passed by the Dewan Rakyat on 26 February 2025 after roughly five decades of campaigning by journalists and media bodies, and the Act came into force on 14 June 2025. The Council opened its complaints mechanism on 22 January 2026, with a second phase running from 8 April to 30 September, and in July the Prime Minister directed that complaints against journalists from recognised media organisations be referred to it before any investigation or enforcement action.

Its relationship to the two mapped outlets is participatory rather than supervisory. Under the Council’s current complaints framework, state media is represented on the self-regulator while neither mapped organisation is an organisational member: RTM’s Director-General and BERNAMA’s Chief Executive Officer sit on its board as the two government representatives provided for in the Act. The Council has declined at least one complaint against a non-member for lack of jurisdiction, so the mechanism does not currently appear to provide an external complaints route over either RTM or BERNAMA. BERNAMA retains its statutory Supervisory Council; RTM has no equivalent.

Both organisations articulate professional commitments alongside their institutional positions. BERNAMA’s statutory objects require complete, objective and impartial news and truthful and fair reporting; its corporate objective separately commits it to accurate, fast, fair and balanced coverage, while its customer charter provides for prompt correction of errors. In August 2026 its Chief Executive Officer said publicly that credible media must remain independent, must ask necessary questions and must be critical without prejudice, and that editorial judgement and human accountability must remain central as AI is adopted. Those commitments are recorded in the profiles as countervailing evidence. What SMM did not identify at either organisation is a mechanism through which they could be enforced against contrary direction.

Media profiles