The state media in MENA, the region consisting of the Middle East and North Africa, are also heavily captured. Most of them are editorially controlled by authorities: 84, or 96%, of the total 88 state media outlets. The share is 10% higher than last year.
MENA also sports the highest incidence of captured outlets, according to our State Media Matrix, some 33% of all being either a private or public captured outlet. That is a significant jump from 24% in 2021, a result of both the changes in our methodology (that affected media entities in Algeria, Iran and Morocco), but also the appearance of new cases of captured media.For example, as predicted in the 2021 version of this study, the political crisis triggered by the resignation of the Tunisian prime minister in July 2021 had a significant impact on the independence of the media. Within the past year, four state media companies in Tunisia lost independence following an introduction of “exceptional measures” by president Saied in July 2021, which had a significant influence on our sample.
Additionally, the Jordanian television broadcaster Al-Mamlaka lost its independent status, being relegated to the State Controlled (SC) typology after starting to follow a government-friendly editorial line and failing to cover controversial topics, such as the King’s conflict with a former Crown prince or Pandora Papers, an investigation that shed light on the King’s investments abroad.
At the same time, the number of independent state media companies in MENA decreased by six entities. They now make up only 4% of all state media companies in the region, down from 13% in 2021. The few exceptions include Israel where the state media enjoy some more editorial freedom, as well as isolated examples of outlets such as Sky News Arabia in UAE and Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) in Iran. In Israel, the two state media companies, Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC) and Galatz, although under constant political pressures, are both independent, according to our matrix.
Overall, the MENA region is home to a few heavily state-controlled media systems, including Libya and Egypt in the Northern African region and Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Yemen and the Palestine Territories in the Middle East. In these countries, journalists are faced with numerous restrictions including laws that enable jailing critical journalists for spreading fake news, the most favorite pretext lately used by the governments in the region to lock up journalists.
One key factor that influences the media in the region is the lack of stability. Even if they manage to protect their independence for a while, media companies are constantly at risk of falling under government control. Particularly in the region’s failed states (Yemen, Syria, Libya), state media are hardly able to operate independently. In these countries, it is even difficult to properly identify state media as numerous entities, including political factions and warlords, claim to be the legitimate state authorities. Indeed, for Yemen, our database now includes media outlets controlled by the Houthi government and the Presidential Leadership Council, resulting in four new entities in the sample. The Houthi-affiliated Supreme Political Council (SPC) was established in 2016 to represent the political party of the late President Ali Abdullah Saleh and the interests of the Houthi Movement. The Presidential Leadership Council is the executive arm of Yemen’s internationally recognized government, which was created in April 2022 in Riyadh with support from Saudi Arabia.
Finally, the MENA region has also seen the rapid growth of a cluster of pan-Arabic and global media players, many of which are funded or managed by governments. Most of them were founded in the region’s wealthy emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. At the same time, Egypt has been also investing in the satellite television sector in its ambition to influence the region. Although these media outlets often produce high-quality news reporting, they remain in majority under the control of the authorities that fund them, rarely, if at all, daring to criticize their country’s political leadership.