Ladder
Ladder: licensing and closure of outlets
A government requires newspapers, broadcasters or news websites to register or to hold a licence, and uses that power to refuse, suspend or cancel it, or to close the outlet. Broadcast licences, which governments issue because radio and television frequencies are limited, are a common lever.
The number of entries reflects the depth of this record, not the severity of a country's conduct.
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2Pressure
Using state power short of prosecution to change coverage: regulatory threats, licence reviews, funding cuts, lawsuits by officials, official "fake news" or "foreign agent" labels, advertising pressure, tax audits.
On September 17, 2025, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the United States regulator of broadcasting, Brendan Carr, said broadcasters could "do this the easy way or the hard way" over remarks by the television host Jimmy Kimmel, and warned of "additional work for the FCC…
Reversed 23 September 2025 · 2 sources · Full entry
In July 1997, the government of President Alberto Fujimori stripped Baruch Ivcher, the Israeli-born owner of Peru's Frecuencia Latina-Canal 2 television station, of his Peruvian citizenship, making him ineligible under Peruvian law to own the station.
Sustained · 2 sources · Full entry
Zimbabwe's parliament passed the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), requiring every journalist and media company to obtain a government license renewed every two years, weeks before a closely contested 2002 presidential election.
Unknown · 1 source · Full entry
Hungary's parliament, controlled by Prime Minister Viktor Orban's Fidesz party, passed a media law creating a government-appointed National Media and Infocommunications Authority empowered to fine any outlet, print, broadcast or online, for coverage it deemed unbalanced or offensive to public moral…
Sustained 1 January 2011 · 1 source · Full entry
Tanzania's government, under President John Magufuli, issued regulations requiring anyone running a blog or website with user content to register with the telecoms regulator and pay an annual fee reported at roughly $930, with vaguely worded content bans.
Unknown 12 April 2018 · 2 sources · Full entry
Slovakia's parliament, controlled by Prime Minister Robert Fico's coalition, dissolved public broadcaster RTVS and replaced it with a new entity, STVR, whose director is now chosen through a process giving parliament and the culture ministry more direct control, prompting protests and criticism fro…
Sustained 1 July 2024 · 2 sources · Full entry
3Punish
Legal or physical action against individual journalists or sources: subpoenas and record seizures, prosecutions, arrests, detention, expulsions, visa denials, assault where a government actor is involved.
Pakistan's parliament amended the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act to create a new Social Media Protection and Regulatory Authority with power to block online content and a Social Media Protection Tribunal, and made spreading information deemed 'fake or false' punishable by up to three years in…
Sustained · 2 sources · Full entry
Ethiopian authorities arrested at least six journalists between August and September 2025, including three from Sheger FM after the Ethiopian Media Authority ordered the station to delete a broadcast it accused of bias and inciting violence, ahead of national elections scheduled for 2026.
Ongoing 22 September 2025 · 1 source · Full entry
4Silence
Removing outlets or channels from the public sphere: closures, licence withdrawals, forced sales, blocking and shutdowns, prior restraint, nationalisation.
In March 1913 the Ottoman government amended its 1909 press law, barring members of parliament and state officials from serving as newspaper editors and applying the ban retroactively to every periodical already in print.
Sustained 9 March 1913 · 2 sources · Full entry
In 1922, Soviet Russia created Glavlit, a single agency that reviewed newspapers, books, plays and even posters before they could be printed or performed.
Ongoing 1 January 1989 · 2 sources · Full entry
In 1926, colonial authorities in the Dutch East Indies ended publication of Mawa, a newspaper linked to the Communist Association of the Indies in Soerakarta, through repeated use of Article 153 bis of the colonial Penal Code, which criminalized advocating the overthrow of the government.
Sustained 1 January 1926 · 2 sources · Full entry
Weeks after Adolf Hitler became German chancellor, the government used a fire that heavily damaged the Reichstag building to obtain President Paul von Hindenburg's approval for a decree suspending the constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press, along with the rights to assembly and free expre…
Sustained 1 May 1945 · 2 sources · Full entry
In 1933, Germany's Editors Law (Schriftleitergesetz) required journalists to register with a new state-controlled Reich Press Chamber and barred non-Aryans from the profession.
Reversed 8 May 1945 · 2 sources · Full entry
President Getúlio Vargas created the Department of Press and state messaging in 1939 during Brazil's Estado Novo dictatorship, giving the government direct control over what newspapers, radio and film could publish.
Reversed 1 January 1945 · 2 sources · Full entry
Canada invoked the War Measures Act at the outset of the Second World War and used it to bring in the Defence of Canada Regulations, which gave the government power to review and restrict hundreds of newspapers and periodicals and to ban dozens of organizations, including the Communist Party of Can…
Sustained 31 December 1945 · 2 sources · Full entry
The collaborationist government installed in occupied Greece created a Directorate-General for Press and Radio to take over and expand the prior review powers of the prewar Metaxas dictatorship, requiring official permission before films, plays, music, and publications could reach the public.
Sustained · 2 sources · Full entry
Under Prime Minister Daniel François Malan, South Africa's parliament approved the Suppression of Communism Act in 1950, defining communism broadly enough to cover most opposition to apartheid.
Reversed 31 July 1991 · 4 sources · Full entry
La Prensa, one of Argentina's leading newspapers and a longtime critic of President Juan Perón's government, was expropriated by the state earlier in 1951.
Sustained 1 October 1951 · 3 sources · Full entry
President Gamal Abdel Nasser's government issued a decree on May 24, 1960 placing every newspaper and magazine in Egypt under state ownership and management, with the government appointing editors and deciding content, ending private control of the country's press.
Ongoing 1 January 1989 · 2 sources · Full entry
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency on June 25, 1975, and the next day her government imposed pre-press controls on every Indian newspaper, requiring official clearance before publication and later forcibly merging the country's news agencies into one.
Reversed 21 March 1977 · 1 source · Full entry
On October 19, 1977, a day South Africans came to call Black Wednesday, the government banned the newspapers The World and Weekend World and had the Special Branch police arrest editor Percy Qoboza and deputy editor Aggrey Klaaste.
Sustained 1 March 1978 · 4 sources · Full entry
Under General Chun Doo-hwan's martial-law government, South Korean authorities ordered newsrooms in 1980 to purge journalists who had resisted press controls or joined a May sit-in strike for press freedom, and closed 172 periodicals, dismissing roughly 2,000 journalists in total.
Reversed 1 June 1987 · 2 sources · Full entry
Malaysia's government amended the Printing Presses and Publications Act in 1987 to expand its power to ban or restrict publications and to bar any court challenge to the suspension or revocation of a publishing permit.
Sustained · 2 sources · Full entry
Home Secretary Douglas Hurd directed British broadcasters in October 1988 not to air the voices of representatives of Sinn Féin, a party linked to the Irish Republican Army, and other groups linked to violence in Northern Ireland.
Reversed 16 September 1994 · 1 source · Full entry
Gazprom, Russia's state-controlled gas company, used debts owed by NTV's parent company to take control of the country's last major independent television network at a shareholders' meeting, replacing its owner and top editors with its own appointees.
Sustained 14 April 2001 · 1 source · Full entry
Zimbabwe's Supreme Court ruled the Daily News, the country's largest independent newspaper, was operating unregistered under a 2002 media law, and police shut its offices the next day; the paper stayed closed for nearly seven years.
Note: The country's largest independent newspaper was shut by police and kept off newsstands for nearly seven years, not a temporary suspension or fine.
Reversed 27 May 2010 · 3 sources · Full entry
Venezuela's government let Radio Caracas Television's twenty-year broadcast concession expire rather than renew it, replacing the country's most-watched channel with a new state broadcaster; a regional human rights court later found the decision violated free expression.
Note: The country's most-watched television channel lost its national broadcast concession entirely, later found by an international court to have been aimed at ending its critical coverage.
Sustained 8 September 2015 · 3 sources · Full entry
After a failed July 2016 coup attempt, Turkey's government closed more than 100 newspapers, television and radio stations, news agencies and publishing houses by state-of-emergency decree, citing alleged links to the movement it blamed for the coup.
Sustained 31 December 2016 · 2 sources · Full entry
Cambodia's tax authority presented the independent, English-language Cambodia Daily with a $6.3 million bill the paper called arbitrary and undocumented, forcing the 24-year-old newspaper to close rather than pay, amid a wider campaign against independent media before 2018 elections.
Sustained 4 September 2017 · 2 sources · Full entry
Hungary's Media Council ended Klubradio's decades-old terrestrial broadcast license, citing errors in its renewal application, after the station had built a following as one of the country's few remaining independent voices.
Note: A national broadcast regulator ended one of the country's last independent stations' terrestrial license over its paperwork, and the country's top court upheld the decision.
Upheld by a court 1 September 2021 · 3 sources · Full entry
Weeks after seizing power, Myanmar's military junta revoked the operating licenses of five independent media outlets covering protests against the coup and raided two of their newsrooms, seizing computers and files; journalists from the outlets were later arrested and charged under a broadened pena…
Sustained · 2 sources · Full entry
Apple Daily, Hong Kong's largest pro-democracy newspaper, printed its final edition after the government froze its parent company's assets and arrested its editors under the national security law imposed on the territory in 2020.
Note: A newspaper's assets were frozen and its senior editors charged with offenses carrying up to life imprisonment, ending publication entirely rather than a licensing dispute or fine.
Sustained 24 June 2021 · 3 sources · Full entry
A Moscow court suspended the print license of Novaya Gazeta, whose editor Dmitry Muratov shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, after the media regulator Roskomnadzor said the paper had not provided documents about a 2006 change of ownership.
Note: A national court ended a Nobel-recognized newspaper's print license outright over a sixteen-year-old paperwork dispute, not a temporary suspension or fine.
Sustained 5 September 2022 · 2 sources · Full entry
Prime Minister Hun Sen personally ordered the license of independent outlet Voice of Democracy revoked over an article about an earthquake-aid agreement signed by his son, rejecting the outlet's published apology.
Note: The head of government personally ordered a national outlet's operating license revoked over one article, rejecting a published apology, rather than pursuing a defamation suit.
Sustained 13 February 2023 · 2 sources · Full entry
President Javier Milei's government fenced off and shut down Telam, Argentina's state-owned news agency, calling it a public-relations operation for the prior Kirchnerist governments; unions and journalist groups called the closure one of the most serious blows to press freedom in decades of Argent…
Sustained · 1 source · Full entry
5Eliminate
Long imprisonment, killing, disappearance or forced exile of journalists, with state involvement as the sources state it.
On December 15, 2025, the High Court of Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China with its own courts, convicted Jimmy Lai, founder of the newspaper Apple Daily, on two counts of "conspiracy to commit collusion with foreign forces" under the National Security Law, which China's central go…
Sustained 8 February 2026 · 5 sources · Full entry
All ladders · Licensing and closure of outlets: by country and year · The United States chapter