Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso is a landlocked Sahelian country in West Africa of about 24–25 million people (around 24.6 million in 2026 estimates), bordered by Mali, Niger, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, with Ouagadougou as its capital. A former French colony, known as Upper Volta until 1984 and independent since 5 August 1960, it is a low-income economy heavily dependent on agriculture, especially cotton, and on gold, which dominates its exports; poverty remains high (the World Bank reports more than 40% of the population below the national poverty line) and notes that the economy remains vulnerable to security and climatic shocks.

Since a pair of coups in 2022, the country has been governed by a military-led transition under Captain Ibrahim Traoré, who was sworn in as transitional president in October 2022; the Transition Charter was amended in May 2024 to set a new 60-month transition period starting on 2 July 2024, with elections possible earlier if security conditions allow. In foreign policy, Burkina Faso has pivoted away from traditional Western partners, withdrawing from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and forming, with Mali and Niger, the Alliance — later Confederation — of Sahel States (AES), a realignment accompanied by similar patterns of media restriction and pressure across the three juntas.

Burkina Faso’s media environment, once among the more pluralistic in the region, has deteriorated sharply under the transition. Reporters Without Borders ranked Burkina Faso 110th of 180 in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, with a score of 48.52, in the “difficult” category and down five places on the year. RSF reports that the authorities have suspended local and foreign news outlets, that interrogations by the intelligence services have become routine, that some journalists have been forcibly conscripted into the army or driven into exile, and that reporters have gone missing; legal restrictions adopted in 2019 on reporting military operations have reinforced self-censorship.

Broadcasting and the wider media sector are regulated by the Conseil Supérieur de la Communication (CSC), which was reformed in 2023 so that the head of state appoints its president, reducing the regulator’s distance from the executive. State media fall under the Ministry of Communication, Culture, Arts and Tourism. National policy has not introduced sector-specific rules on AI-generated or synthetic news content in the state media.

Burkina Faso’s state-owned media in this dataset comprise two organisations, both classified State-Controlled (SC)—though one of them reached that category only recently. The Radiodiffusion Télévision du Burkina (RTB) is the national public broadcaster, with roots in Radio Haute-Volta (1959) and television from 1963; constituted as a state establishment in 1999, it operates national television and radio networks and is closely tied to the executive, a proximity underscored by the fact that the interim Prime Minister appointed in December 2024, Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouédraogo, is a former director of RTB. RTB has been classified SC throughout the dataset’s history.

Sidwaya, the state press and publishing enterprise built around the daily Sidwaya Quotidien (founded in 1984 during the Sankara revolution) and operating as Les Éditions Sidwaya, presents the more telling trajectory: in the State Media Monitor dataset it was classified as Independent State-Funded Media (ISFM) through 2024 and reclassified as State-Controlled in 2025, reflecting the erosion of editorial independence under the transition: leadership appointed through government processes, alignment with the transitional authorities, and the absence of any editorial safeguard. The associated national news agency, the Agence d’Information du Burkina (AIB), was detached into a separate state agency around 2024–2025. The 2026 typology distribution therefore stands at 2 SC, the product of one continuous and one newly tightened state-media relationship.

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