According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Mozambique has dropped eight places in the Global Press Freedom Index, moving from position 108 to 116 in 2021 and 2022, respectively.
The source notes that recent years have seen many hostile speeches and verbal attacks on journalists (a dozen in total in 2021).
"Access to the north of the country, the site of an Islamist insurgency since 2017, is now virtually impossible without risking arrest. Two journalists who tried were detained for four months in 2019 and another has been missing since April 2020. The news blackout also affects international media, who are finding it increasingly difficult to get permission to cover this story. A British journalist who had been based in Mozambique for years and founded a major news website was expelled on spurious grounds and banned from returning for ten years," reads the RSF website.
Data released by RSF indicate that Mozambique has almost 1,000 media outlets, mainly newspapers and magazines, but many are no longer active because they are not economically viable. The government-controlled daily Notícias is the main newspaper. O País is the most popular independent daily. Savana and Canal de Moçambique are independent weeklies with a fairly high profile. Mozambique also has about 20 television channels and just over 50 radio stations.
In Africa, press freedom has many facets, according to RSF, from the abundance of media in Senegal (73rd) and South Africa (35th), to the deafening silence of private media in Eritrea (179th) and Djibouti (164th). The institution states that despite a wave of liberalization in the 1990s, there are still, all too often, cases of arbitrary censorship, especially on the Internet, with occasional network shutdowns in some countries, arrests of journalists, and violent attacks. These usually go completely unpunished, as was the case with the 2016 disappearance of the Malian journalist Birama Touré who, as RSF has shown, was kidnapped by a Malian intelligence agency and most likely killed.
In recent years, a wave of draconian laws criminalizing online journalism has dealt a new blow to the right to information. At the same time, the spread of rumors, propaganda, and misinformation has contributed to the weakening of journalism and access to quality information.
Often poorly supported by the government and still largely dependent on the editorial dictates of their owners, African media struggle to develop sustainable economic models. However, the recent emergence of coalitions of investigative journalists has resulted in major revelations about matters of public interest.
Long stifled by dictatorships, the media landscape has opened up to varying degrees in countries such as Angola (99th), Zimbabwe (137th), and Ethiopia (114th), but in most cases repression of dissident journalists persists.
In the Sahel, insecurity and political instability have increased sharply, and there have been recent major blows to journalism. In 2021, two Spanish journalists were killed in Burkina Faso (41st), a French reporter, Olivier Dubois, was kidnapped by an armed group in Mali (111th), and several journalists were expelled from Benin (121st), Mali, and Burkina Faso.
Globally, the RSF's 20th World Press Freedom Index also reveals a twofold increase in polarization amplified by information chaos, i.e. media polarization, fueling divisions within countries, as well as polarization between countries internationally.
Contemplating (the state of journalism) a universe of 180 countries and territories, the document highlights the disastrous effects of news and information chaos, the effects of a globalized and unregulated online information space that encourages fake news and propaganda.
Within democratic societies, divisions are growing as a result of the spread of opinion media following the "Fox News model" and the spread of disinformation circuits that are amplified by the way the media operates.
Thus, RSF believes that democracies are being weakened by the asymmetry between open societies and despotic regimes that control their online media and platforms, while waging propaganda wars against democracies. The polarization at these two levels is fueling increased tension. (The Country)