May 5, 2025
THIMPHU – Bhutan’s press freedom ranking has plunged to its lowest level in decades, according to the 2025 World Press Freedom Index released yesterday by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). The country is now ranked 152nd out of 180 countries and territories, a five-place drop from its 147th position last year, and a staggering fall from 33rd place just four years ago.
Bhutan’s press freedom ranking nosedived from 33rd place in 2022 to 90th in 2023, to 147th in 2024, and to 152nd this year.
The annual index, which evaluates the state of journalism across the world, assigns each country a score out of 100. Bhutan scored 32.62 this year, down from 37.29 in 2024, placing it squarely in RSF’s “very serious” category, reserved for nations scoring between 0 and 40.
The ranking is based on five indicators: political context, legal framework, economic environment, sociocultural conditions, and safety. Bhutan fared particularly poorly in four of the five: ranking 161st in political context, 170th in economic, 169th in legal, and 174th in social. The country’s best showing was in safety, where it ranked 83rd.
This score is calculated on the basis of two components: a quantitative tally of abuses against media and journalists in connection with their work; and a qualitative analysis of the situation in each country or territory based on the responses of press freedom specialists (including journalists, researchers, academics, and human rights defenders) to an RSF questionnaire available in 25 languages. Among South Asian nations, Bhutan now lags behind Nepal (90th), the Maldives (104th), Sri Lanka (139th), Bangladesh (149th), and India (151st), ranking only ahead of Pakistan (158th) and Afghanistan (175th).
Bhutanese officials quickly dismissed RSF’s assessment. “Bhutan does not agree with the media ranking published by RSF,” said Sonam Penjor, director of the Department of Media, Creative Industry and Intellectual Property (DoMCIIP). “It is completely one-sided, not comprehensive, and misinforms the whole world.”
He questioned the transparency of RSF’s methodology, saying the government does not know who RSF contacted or how the survey was conducted.
“To get a clear picture of the media situation in Bhutan, the country needs to reassess how RSF is judging the media ranking. The government also doesn’t know who they contact and what type of questionnaires they provide to respondents,” said DoMCIIP director.
Media leaders in Bhutan acknowledged the country’s press faces serious economic headwinds. Rinzin Wangchuk, executive director of the Journalists’ Association of Bhutan (JAB), called the decline “a matter of concern”, particularly given the efforts made to support the media sector.
“While the ranking reflects certain challenges, recent assessments by the JAB suggest that many of the media’s core functions are still intact, with limited significant challenges reported. However, the sustainability of the Bhutanese media industry is still a challenging issue,” he said.
Rinzin Wangchuk linked Bhutan’s weak showing on economic indicators to the lingering economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, which crippled advertising revenues. “Despite this, the government’s increased access to information and financial assistance to support media initiatives are positive steps. Recognising that economic stability is crucial for media freedom, continued efforts to bolster the media’s financial resilience are essential,” he said.
He suggested a multipronged strategy that includes diversifying revenue streams, improving media literacy, and strengthening the resilience of Bhutan’s media ecosystem to reverse the downward trend and ensuring a free, vibrant press in Bhutan.
The chief editor of The Bhutanese newspaper, Tenzin Lamsang, said this year’s focus is more on the economic aspect, and this also correlates to Bhutan’s individual ranking.
“Bhutan’s two lowest rankings are in economic and social indicators. Media as a whole has been saying for a long time that media sustainability is becoming a major challenge in Bhutan,” he said. “From 2010, the governments have been cutting advertisements. Now we have something called e-procurement where the majority of government construction tenders are put there and not given to the media outlets.”
He said to improve the ranking, the government and stakeholders have to come up with ways to ensure economic sustainability for the media as a whole in Bhutan. “Access to information is becoming an issue and that needs to be addressed.”
A senior reporter at Business Bhutan, Sangay Rabten, said that while the RSF sample size may be questionable, its identification of access to information and economic fragility as critical challenges needs to be acknowledged and addressed.
“Nonetheless, we can improve. For this, all should contribute. The government and other agencies should support media outlets, especially private media, for sustainability. The protocol of access to information should be improved,” he said.
RSF’s justification
On political context, RSF mentioned that alternation between the different political parties does not seem to have any impact on press freedom in the country, where self-censorship remains pervasive.
Under the legal framework, RSF highlighted that journalists report difficulties getting access to state-held and governmental information, which ultimately deprives the population of information of public interest.
The report also said that privately owned publications survive in a difficult economic environment, with a relatively low readership and insufficient advertising, which, for the most part, comes from government agencies — they account for 80 per cent of newspapers’ advertising revenue, which is allocated based on the outlets’ proximity to those in power.
Self-censorship is one of the main problems many journalists in Bhutan practice in fear of appearing to challenge the social order, according to RSF.
“Journalists are rarely the targets of physical threats. However, as a result of social media’s development, those who publish investigative reports or bothersome articles can be the subject of online harassment campaigns,” the report states.
Global media scenario
Although physical attacks against journalists are the most visible violations of press freedom, economic pressure is also a major, more insidious problem, according to RSF.
The economic indicator on the RSF World Press Freedom Index now stands at an unprecedented, critical low as its decline continues in 2025. Due to this, the global state of press freedom is now classified as a “difficult situation” for the first time in the history of the Index.
According to data collected by RSF for the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, in 160 out of the 180 countries assessed, media outlets achieve financial stability “with difficulty” — or “not at all.”
News outlets are shutting down due to economic hardship in nearly a third of countries globally. Thirty-four countries stand out for the mass closures of their media outlets, which has led to the exile of journalists in recent years.
Media concentration and the dominance of online platforms are a serious blow to a media economy already weakened by the dominance that tech giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft have over the dissemination of information.
The RSF’s methodology includes extensive questionnaires, comprising nearly 125 questions across political, legal, economic, sociocultural, and safety domains, aimed at assessing press autonomy, freedom from censorship, financial independence, and journalist safety.
The world’s freest media environments in 2025, according to RSF, are in Norway, Estonia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Ireland, Portugal, Switzerland, and Czechia. At the bottom of the index are Eritrea, North Korea, China, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Russia.