Haiti

Haiti’s media operate in one of the most dangerous and institutionally fragile environments in the Western Hemisphere. The country has had no elected national officials since January 2023, when the terms of its last elected senators expired. Executive authority was subsequently exercised through the Transitional Presidential Council, whose mandate ended on 7 February 2026, when authority passed to the Cabinet of Ministers led by Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé.

Armed gangs control large parts of Port-au-Prince and have extended their operations beyond the capital. Journalists face threats, attacks, kidnappings and killings, frequently with impunity; many media workers have fled, gone into hiding or been displaced from their homes and workplaces. Newsrooms and broadcasting facilities have also been attacked or abandoned, making reporting from many parts of the capital exceptionally dangerous.

Reporters Without Borders ranked Haiti 107th of 180 countries in its 2026 World Press Freedom Index, with a score of 50.32. Haiti had ranked 111th in 2025, with a slightly higher score of 51.061. Its four-place rise in the ranking should not be read as an improvement in domestic press-freedom conditions: the underlying score deteriorated, while global press freedom fell to its lowest average level in the Index’s 25-year history. Haiti’s security indicator placed it considerably lower, at 132nd, with a score of 45.10.

Radio remains Haiti’s most widely followed mass medium. RSF reports more than 700 radio and television stations, though only around half operate legally with a licence from the telecommunications regulator, Conatel — a large and diverse but severely threatened media landscape in which insecurity, displacement, economic fragility and the weakening of public institutions place pressure on both public and private outlets.

Within the State Media Monitor mapping, the Haitian state-media footprint is concentrated in one organisation: Radio Télévision Nationale d’Haïti (RTNH), the umbrella designation for two national state broadcasting services — Télévision Nationale d’Haïti (TNH) and Radio Nationale d’Haïti (RNH). Both are based in Port-au-Prince, broadcast in French and Haitian Creole, and are financed and administered within the Haitian state apparatus.

RTNH remains classified State-Controlled (SC) for 2026. The revised 2025/26 budget assigned HTG 322,014,220 to TNH and HTG 187,350,191 to RNH, a combined allocation of HTG 509,364,411, and both appear as separate administrative sections within the Ministry of Communication. Government expenditure records show that by 30 June 2026 TNH had used 66.62% of its revised allocation and RNH 68.28%, confirming that both services remained active and directly financed through the national budget.

The broadcasters have been subject to a restructuring process since February 2025. A commission appointed by the transitional executive and headed by Sandra Duvivier was installed on 24 February 2025 with an initial six-month mandate to assess RTNH, oversee its provisional management and recommend technical, administrative and editorial reforms. Its stated objectives included reliable and impartial information, more balanced programming, professional training, modernised infrastructure and equitable coverage of future elections. The commission prepared a final report covering February to August 2025, publicly presented in January 2026. No decree, statute or institutional instrument was identified by July 2026 implementing a permanent new governance model in response to that report; Radio Nationale’s official website nevertheless continued to identify Duvivier as president of the RTNH commission in July 2026, indicating that the commission remained publicly presented as exercising management or restructuring responsibilities beyond the expiry of its original mandate.

Some practical professionalisation measures have followed. In October 2025, RNH and the Office of Management and Human Resources announced a competitive recruitment process for journalists, technicians and administrative personnel under the procedures governing entry into the Haitian civil service. These may strengthen professional capacity, but they do not alter the broadcasters’ ownership, budgetary placement or executive-appointed management structure. No independent governing board, protected senior-management appointment process, statutory editorial firewall or autonomous public-service-media regulator has been established for TNH or RNH. State Media Monitor’s latest published assessment found that RTNH continued to operate under significant government influence, with editorial decisions remaining predominantly shaped by government authorities, even though the broadcaster was no longer necessarily functioning as a straightforward propaganda outlet.

The reform process is therefore real but incomplete. It has introduced public-service-oriented objectives, competitive recruitment and proposals for administrative and editorial modernisation. It has not created structural independence, and no sufficiently broad independent content assessment for 2025–26 demonstrates sustained editorial autonomy in practice. Under the SMM typology, an Independent State-Funded and State-Managed broadcaster must remain publicly funded and state-managed while operating without direct editorial interference; the available evidence does not show that RTNH has reached that threshold. Its two services remain directly budgeted within a government ministry, their provisional management originated in an executive appointment, and no legal safeguards insulate their editorial decisions from political authority.

The State-Controlled classification should consequently remain unchanged. It rests on RTNH’s current ownership, financing, governance and editorial-control conditions rather than on the identity of any individual transitional authority. Any future reclassification would require both durable institutional reform and persuasive evidence that TNH and RNH exercise editorial independence in practice.

Haiti’s defining media problem extends well beyond the governance of its state broadcaster. Public and private media alike operate amid gang violence, impunity, economic collapse and the erosion of state institutions. RTNH’s incomplete reform should therefore be understood within a wider environment in which the most immediate challenge for journalists is often not access to an editorially autonomous public broadcaster, but the ability to report and remain alive.

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