Mauritania

The Islamic Republic of Mauritania is a Saharan and Sahelian state of roughly five million people, with its capital at Nouakchott and the ouguiya (MRU) as its currency. Arabic is the official language; French is widely used in government and media, alongside Hassaniya, Wolof, Pulaar and Soninké. The country withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States in 2000 and is today a member of the African Union and the Arab Maghreb Union.

President Mohamed Ould Cheikh El Ghazouani was re-elected to a second five-year term in the June 2024 election, with Mokhtar Ould Diay (Djay) appointed Prime Minister on 2 August 2024 and still in office in May 2026. The dominant political event of the wider review period was the 4 November 2025 Supreme Court ruling confirming the conviction of former president Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz on corruption-related charges. Reform of the state-media sector has remained on the government’s agenda, including public-media modernisation and the regularisation of public-media workers, but no reform has altered the ownership, appointment or editorial-independence framework of the three state outlets.

Mauritania’s state media sit within a comparatively well-defined statutory framework, but one in which all three institutions report to the same supervising ministry and operate without statutory editorial-independence safeguards. The supervising body is the Ministry of Culture, Arts, Communication and Relations with Parliament, Government Spokesperson, currently headed by El Houssein Ould Meddou, the former president of the Haute Autorité de la Presse et de l’Audiovisuel (HAPA), who was appointed to the cabinet portfolio in August 2024.

The Haute Autorité de la Presse et de l’Audiovisuel is the sector regulator; Mohamed Abdallahi Lahbib was appointed its president by presidential decree on 29 August 2024 and sworn in on 10 September 2024. Under Law 026-2008 as amended by Law 2022-22 of 17 August 2022, the HAPA holds statutory approval power over the appointment of directors-general at public audiovisual bodies, and exercised that power in the January 2024 approval of the current head of Radio Mauritanie. The broadcasting reform of 2011, Council of Ministers decrees that converted Télévision de Mauritanie and Radio Mauritanie from public administrative establishments (EPA) into sociétés anonymes operating under contrat-programme with the state, and the 2024 institutional creation of the transmission company Télédiffusion de Mauritanie (TDM-SA) by Décret n°2024/PM/MCJSRP of 2 February 2024 and Loi 2024-018 together constitute Mauritania’s Pôle de l’audiovisuel public. The Mauritanian News Agency was not transformed by the 2011 decrees and remains an EPA. Mauritania ranked 61st of 180 in the Reporters Without Borders 2026 World Press Freedom Index with a score of 63.36, in the “problematic” band, down 11 places from 50th in 2025, with Mauritania remaining among the best-ranked Arab countries in the index, and RSF’s country profile explicitly identifies TVM, Radio Mauritanie and AMI as the state-controlled public media.

Three state media outlets are tracked in the State Media Monitor dataset for Mauritania, all classified as State-Controlled. They form a structurally tight cluster, three institutions, one supervising ministry, parallel appointment channels through the Council of Ministers, and a shared HAPA-approval pathway at the two broadcasters, but with one important institutional fault line: the two broadcasters were converted to sociétés anonymes by the 2011 reform while the news agency remains an EPA.

Télévision de Mauritanie (TVM) — State-Controlled (SC). Mauritania’s national television broadcaster, founded in 1980 as part of the former Office de Radio Télévision de Mauritanie, autonomous since 10 July 1984 and constituted as TVM-SA in 2011. The broadcaster runs the flagship Al Mouritaniya channel alongside three thematic channels, broadcasts in Arabic (Standard and Hassaniya), French and the principal Mauritanian languages, and is headquartered at Tevragh Zeina in Nouakchott. Its Director-General is Sidi Abdallah Mohamed Lemine Ould Saleck; the Prime Minister appoints the President of the Board, with other board members named through ministerial decree. The capacity of TVM leadership to exercise direct editorial control was illustrated in January 2025, when then-Director-General Sunniya Mint Sidi Haiba dismissed the broadcaster’s training director, Moussa Ould Bouhli, following his Facebook Live broadcasts; local press coverage described the dismissal in the context of a “marked decline” in press freedom in Mauritania.

Radio Mauritanie — State-Controlled (SC). Mauritania’s national public-service radio broadcaster, with origins as Radio Nationale de Mauritanie in Saint-Louis (Senegal) in 1958 and Nouakchott in 1959, autonomous from TVM since 1990 and constituted as Radio Mauritanie S.A. in 2011. The official Radio Mauritanie site lists 11 named regional stations alongside thematic stations Radio Jeunesse (launched 2012) and Radio Coran / Radio du Saint Coran (operational by at least 2014); the public-media expansion programme has added or equipped a wider set of local and departmental stations, and a May 2026 government communiqué referred to 33 radio stations built and equipped, including the new Ghabou station inaugurated by the supervising minister, the foundation stone laid at Boghé and an extension of the Tagant station. The Director-General is Mohamed Abdelkader Ould Allada / Ould Alada, HAPA-approved in the role on 10 January 2024 and still identified in the position in March 2026 reporting.

Mauritanian News Agency (AMI) — State-Controlled (SC). The state news agency, founded in 1975 as Agence Mauritanienne de Presse (AMP) and now Agence Mauritanienne d’Information. AMI is an établissement public à caractère administratif (it was not covered by the 2011 broadcaster reform, and edits two daily newspapers, Chaab (Al-Shaab, Arabic) and Horizons (French), which originated alongside the agency’s first dispatch in 1975. The agency runs an Arabic and French wire service, a trilingual online platform with English-language content added in recent years, an SMS news service and a monthly review, and maintains a network of regional bureaux and correspondents across Mauritania’s wilayas. The Director-General is Mohamed Taghyoullah Al EDHEM, appointed by the 30 October 2025 Council of Ministers, in the same reshuffle that moved his predecessor Dia Moctar Malal, appointed 4 October 2023, to head the Etablissement Portuaire de la Baie de Repos.

The three outlets sit in the same classification for converging reasons. TVM and Radio Mauritanie are sociétés anonymes operating under contrat-programme with the state, with the Prime Minister appointing the President of the Board and other board members named by ministerial decree, and their Directors-General subject to HAPA approval within a state-led appointment process. AMI is an EPA whose President of the Board of Directors, board members, Director-General and Deputy Director-General are all appointed by decree in the Council of Ministers, with a board statutorily composed of a President plus eleven other members dominated by representatives of seven ministries, a Central Bank representative, the directors-general of the two broadcasters and a single staff member. All three are primarily funded through public allocations; none has a statutory editorial-independence safeguard or independent complaints mechanism; and the State Media Monitor review records that all three echo government narratives in editorial output, with the two broadcasters described as exhibiting a pro-government tone and the news agency as functioning institutionally as the official wire.

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