By Rayhan Jasin

Most public media organizations in Asia are either heavily influenced by or entirely controlled by their respective governments. In fact, three out of every four public media outlets in Asia operate under absolute state control. According to the 2024 State Media Monitor (SMM) report, only three of the 124 Asian public media organizations are classified as Independent Public Media (IP)—the highest independence category in the SMM typology—all of which are based in South Korea. An additional four outlets are categorized as independent but are either owned and funded by the state (ISFM) or managed by the state (ISM). Notably, South Korea’s KBS and Thai PBS were previously recognized as IPs but lost this status in the latest assessment due to reported government interference in editorial operations.

Drawing on data from the SMM report and additional journalistic sources, this article analyses the seven public media organizations that have maintained a degree of editorial independence in Asia. These outlets operate in Bhutan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The analysis seeks to answer three key questions: How do these institutions protect their journalistic integrity from government interference? In what ways do their institutional structures and editorial cultures converge? And what measures can be adopted to preserve such liberal and independent environments?

The article also examines the erosion of editorial independence at KBS and Thai PBS, shedding light on the so-called “threats from below”—pressures that stem not from overt state control but from within society or internal organizational dynamics.

Bhutan: The Happy Nation with a Harmonious Public Broadcaster

Although the Bhutanese government holds a 51% majority stake in Kuensel Corporation, the outlet is classified as Independent State-Managed (ISM) due to its demonstrated editorial autonomy and long-standing commitment to politically balanced reporting. Since 2007, Kuensel has been governed by a five-member board—two nominated by private shareholders and three appointed by the government—ensuring a degree of pluralism in its governance structure. The company publishes a bilingual newspaper in Dzongkha (the national language) and English, serving a broad readership.

With over six decades of continuous operation, Kuensel remains the country’s leading media outlet by circulation. Its digital platform, Kuensel Online, is the most visited news website in Bhutan. Further underscoring its public service ethos, Kuensel has formalized a partnership with the Anti-Corruption Commission to promote ethical business practices and integrity in journalism.

South Korea: A Prime Model of Independent Public Media—With Emerging Cracks

Once hailed as a model of fully independent public broadcasting, South Korea’s media landscape took a sharp turn in the 2024 State Media Monitor report, which downgraded the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) due to mounting government pressure. Concerns included threats to its financial autonomy and direct political interference, including the cancellation of a current affairs programme. As a result, KBS was reclassified by MJRC as a Captured Public (CaPu) media outlet.

Despite this setback, KBS remains an exception rather than the norm. South Korea continues to remain home to the only Independent Public (IP) media entities on the continent, demonstrating robust editorial autonomy, financial resilience, and public accountability. Three key institutions—Korea Educational Broadcasting System (EBS), Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), and Yonhap News Agency—have consistently topped the State Media Monitor rankings since 2022.

Founded in 1997, EBS operates under a board of non-executive directors appointed by the Korea Communications Commission (KCC). Its diversified revenue base includes advertising, product sales, license fees from the public, and limited government subsidies. EBS also maintains an Audience Committee composed of academics, civil society representatives, and educators, designed specifically to protect the independence of its programming.

Established in 1988, MBC serves as South Korea’s cultural public broadcaster. It is majority-owned (70%) by the Foundation for Broadcast Culture (FBC), with its board members also appointed by the KCC. Unlike many public broadcasters, MBC is financially independent from government support, relying solely on advertising revenue. Moreover, its president is selected through a participatory process akin to a political campaign, bolstering transparency and professional accountability. A Viewers Committee, mirroring the structure of EBS’s audience body, further enhances public oversight.

Yonhap News Agency, designated by law as the national news agency since 2003, is co-owned by KBS, MBC, and the Korea News Agency Commission—a hybrid body with representatives appointed by the government, the National Assembly, and media sector actors. Like MBC and EBS, Yonhap is financially independent, generating revenue primarily from news sales, complemented by public grants. It maintains a Complaints Manager, a Content Advisory Committee, and an independent evaluation commission to monitor and uphold journalistic standards. With 550 journalists and photographers, 120 domestic reporters across 13 provinces, and more than 40 foreign correspondents, Yonhap operates the largest news-gathering network in the country.

Efforts to reinforce editorial independence are ongoing. A landmark proposal—the Public Media Governance Act—seeks to establish a 100-member citizens’ committee representing diverse sectors of society to advise on executive appointments at KBS, MBC, and EBS. First introduced in December 2022, the bill remains under parliamentary review.

Taiwan: State-Owned, Yet Editorially Independent

State ownership does not automatically equate to state control—an assertion exemplified by Taiwan’s three principal state-owned media outlets, which maintain a surprising degree of editorial independence and pluralism in their reporting.

The oldest among them, Radio Taiwan International (RTI), was established in 1928 as Central Broadcasting System (CBS) and rebranded in 1996. RTI serves as the Taiwanese government’s flagship radio station. While its board of directors is appointed by the government and operates under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture, RTI enjoys editorial freedom in practice. Roughly 75% of its budget comes from public subsidies, with the remainder funded by airspace rental income. 

Similarly, the Taiwan Broadcasting System (TBS), the country’s main public television entity, is entirely state-owned and government-funded. Formed in 2006 through a media reform initiative that merged CTS and PTS under the Public Television Act of 2009, TBS also oversees Hakka TV, which broadcasts in the Hakka language. TBS is managed by the Public Television Service (PTS) Foundation, whose board is appointed by Taiwan’s legislature, the Yuan Parliament. The foundation receives up to 80% of its funding from the government, supplemented by public donations, both administered through the Ministry of Culture. 

Due to their financial reliance on state funding and management by the state, both RTI and TBS have been categorized as Independent State-Funded and State-Managed Media (ISFM) since 2022. The Central News Agency (CNA) is the only Taiwanese state media outlet that is ranked higher, designated as an Independent State Media (ISM) in the 2024 State Media Monitor Report. CNA’s board is appointed directly by the Prime Minister’s Office. Nevertheless, the agency has made significant strides in reducing its dependency on government funding, decreasing the public share of its budget from 57% in 2019 to just 26% by 2024.

The Importance of Independent Media in Asia: Navigating Threats from Above—and Below

Asian public media outlets are often dismissed as mouthpieces of authoritarian regimes, instruments designed to amplify state propaganda while stifling dissent. This perception is not unfounded, given the common strategies employed by governments: restricting editorial freedoms, infiltrating leadership structures, and controlling budgets and revenue streams. Yet, seven public media institutions across Bhutan, South Korea, and Taiwan offer a convicing narrative. They demonstrate that, even in politically charged environments, it is possible to preserve public service journalism and maintain independence.

These cases reveal three foundational pillars for preserving public media independence: adaptability, independent oversight, and legal reform. In Bhutan, Kuensel Corporation has sustained its editorial independence by embracing technological change—expanding its online presence to remain both relevant and financially viable. South Korea’s three Independent Public media companies have established robust oversight bodies tasked with handling public complaints, auditing content, and enforcing professional standards. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s media landscape illustrates how editorial independence can be preserved through legal frameworks that delegate governance authority to internally autonomous boards, despite continued state ownership and funding. 

However, institutional protection alone is not sufficient. Both KBS in South Korea and Thai PBS, once heralded for their public service ethos, have suffered serious erosions of editorial independence. What went wrong? Media scholars Cherian George and Kyu Ho Yum (2022) argue that “the glare of publicity does not (always) guarantee justice”.  Their concept of ‘apathetic silence’ offers a sobering insight: even in the face of overt political interference and corruption, the public may remain passive, either disillusioned or disconnected from the fate of their media institutions. This erosion of public trust, they argue, is compounded by the rise of shadow digital professionals—covert operatives who flood the information space with disinformation and vilify progressive journalism, ultimately reinforcing political incumbents.

When public support dwindles, societies become desensitized to assaults on press freedom. The normalization of censorship and media capture become part of the daily routine. While the root causes, authoritarian populism, toxic polarization, and ethnic nationalism, are not exclusive to Asia, their effects are increasingly global.

In short, threats to public media independence no longer emanate solely from “above”, through state coercion, but also from “below,” in the form of public apathy and digital manipulation. For a public media institution to truly fulfill its democratic mission, it must remain grounded in the values of public service, actively defend freedom and equality in its reporting, and build trust with its audience. Pursuing financial independence or resisting state censorship in isolation is insufficient. Only by addressing both vertical and grassroots threats can public media institutions maintain their integrity and continue serving as credible sources of information in democratic societies.

Photo by Seoin Kim on Unsplash

By Rayhan Jasin

In many European countries, the independence of public service media rises and falls with the political tide. All too often, a new government doesn’t just take power—it takes the newsroom. One of the first moves after an election victory is to pack public broadcasters’ governing bodies with political loyalists, turning watchdogs into lapdogs. Yet, in a few rare cases, new administrations have tried to reverse course, seeking to depoliticize state-controlled media after years of editorial capture.

This article examines five public media systems—Spain, Greece, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Poland—that have recently changed their State Media Monitor (SMM) classification. Drawing on SMM data and additional journalistic sources, it asks: Is there a pattern in how left- and right-wing governments treat public media? Do liberal parties uphold press freedom, while populists dismantle it, or are all parties equally tempted to turn public broadcasters into mouthpieces?

The Troubled Cases

Spain: A tug-of-war for the mic

Spain offers a textbook case of how public media can become a pawn in partisan power struggles. Although governed by the center-left PSOE under Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s national broadcaster RTVE has faced allegations of political meddling not only from opposition parties, but also from within.

The political heat turned up following Sánchez’s re-election in 2023, when six of RTVE’s ten board members had ties to the ruling PSOE–Podemos coalition. Just a year into his tenure, board president José Manuel Pérez Tornero resigned, publicly citing government overreach. His replacement, Elena Sánchez, didn’t last long either—ousted in March 2024 for resisting political pressure over programming decisions, including a controversial late-night show accused of promoting sensationalism.

After the shake-up, RTVE’s interim leadership approved the show, and by October, the government amended Spain’s public broadcasting law to lower the threshold for board appointments—from a two-thirds supermajority to a simple parliamentary majority. Critics called the move a legislative bulldozer designed to steamroll dissent and cement control. Unsurprisingly, SMM has ranked RTVE as “State Controlled” since 2022, citing both budgetary dependence and governmental dominance in management decisions.

However, PSOE’s rivals are hardly innocent. When the conservative Partido Popular (PP) and the far-right Vox party took power in various regions following the 2023 local elections, they wasted no time in following the same playbook. From Aragon to Madrid, newly empowered regional governments began reshaping public broadcasters, sidelining critical journalists, and rewriting media laws to lower the bar for appointing loyalists.

Madrid’s public broadcaster RTVM, for instance, was targeted by a legal amendment that scrapped the two-thirds majority requirement for board appointments—mirroring the national PSOE strategy, but this time deployed by PP leader Isabel Díaz Ayuso. Elsewhere, regional media such as Canary Islands’ RTVC and Aragon’s CARTV faced newsroom pressure to soften critical coverage of conservative administrations.

Even in regions without a clear electoral link, editorial interference remained rife. Catalonia’s CCMA faced accusations of pro-separatist bias under the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC)-led government, leading to an exodus of disillusioned journalists. In Ceuta, RTVCE’s leadership was reshuffled following pressure from left-leaning local actors, despite their limited parliamentary power.

In response to this wave of political meddling, the SMM downgraded these five regional broadcasters—RTVC, CARTV, RTVM, CCMA and RTVCE—from Independent State-Funded Media to State Controlled status, citing growing editorial interference and politicization of leadership.

Greece: Independence lost at the stroke of a pen

In Greece, public media independence didn’t erode overnight—it was signed away. Following his 2019 election victory, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of the center-right New Democracy (ND) party issued a decree placing the country’s largest news agency, ANA-MPA, directly under his office’s jurisdiction.

By 2021, Mitsotakis had further tightened his grip, reforming the ANA-MPA board to include two additional members appointed exclusively by the ruling party. What was once an independent news platform gradually morphed into a megaphone for government messaging. A 2024 International Press Institute (IPI) report singled out ANA-MPA as a cautionary tale—an agency repurposed to steer public discourse in favor of the government line.

The 2024 edition of the State Media Monitor followed suit, downgrading ANA-MPA from an Independent State-Funded Media outlet to a State Controlled news organization. In this case, media capture wasn’t about loud confrontations or mass firings—it was about quiet institutional redesigns that made critical reporting increasingly untenable.

Slovakia: From license fees to lockdown

Slovakia’s public broadcaster experienced perhaps the most aggressive capture in Europe last year, with democratic norms sidelined in broad daylight.

Once funded in part by public license fees, RTVS had long enjoyed a degree of editorial autonomy. That changed in July 2023, when Slovakia’s parliament—still under pressure from the right-wing opposition—abolished the license fee model. The new funding mechanism tethered RTVS to a fixed percentage of the national GDP, effectively handing the purse strings to the government. The result? A dramatic €55 million budget cut that left the broadcaster limping.

Things went from bad to worse when populist strongman Robert Fico returned to power in October 2023. Within months, Fico’s coalition abolished RTVS entirely and replaced it with a new entity: STVR. The move allowed the government to install an entirely new management and governance structure. Political loyalists, many with ties to the nationalist Slovak National Party (SNS), were handed the reins. SNS leader Andrej Danko openly called for a “state television”—not a public broadcaster. Under the new order, financial independence is a relic of the past: public contributions were scrapped, and all funding now flows directly from the state, subject to the whims of politicians. These overt interventions in RTVS led to its reclassification in 2024 from the Captured Public Media (CaPu) category to the State-Controlled (SC) Media class.

The Turnarounds: When Politics Brought Freedom

Yet not all political interventions spell doom. In rare but notable instances, incoming governments have acted to restore rather than restrict editorial independence.

Poland: Undoing the damage

In Poland, the liberal Civic Platform (PO), led by Donald Tusk, returned to power in 2023 after years of populist rule under the right-wing Law and Justice Party (PiS). One of the PO’s first moves was to begin disentangling the state from Polska Press—the country’s largest media publisher, controversially acquired in 2020 by state-run oil giant PKN Orlen under PiS orders.

Tusk’s new government pledged to sell off Polska Press, a step seen as critical to restoring editorial independence and reversing the PiS-era campaign of “re-Polonizing” the media. In recognition of these reforms, the 2024 State Media Monitor reclassified Polska Press from Captured Public Media to Independent State Media.

More changes may follow at the national broadcaster TVP, long accused of toeing the PiS line. Under the United Right regimes of Beata Szydło and Mateusz Morawiecki, TVP became synonymous with government propaganda. But after the 2023 elections, the new PO-led parliament passed a resolution to overhaul public service media, promising an end to political messaging. In a symbolic move, officials vowed to replace “paintings”—a euphemism for propaganda—with “photography,” a metaphor for reality-based journalism, according to a 2025 report on media capture in Poland. Though the transition has been rocky, the intent is clear: to put journalism, not politics, back in the anchor’s chair.

Slovenia: A green wave cleans house

In Slovenia, too, voters signaled that they’d had enough. The 2022 general election delivered a decisive win to the liberal Green Party under Robert Golob, sweeping away Janez Janša’s right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), which had drawn fire for its authoritarian tendencies and close ties with Hungarian media oligarchs.

Golob began immediately to revamp Slovenia’s media landscape. Key changes included reforms to the law governing the national broadcaster RTV Slovenija (RTVLO), empowering civil society to play a greater role in board appointments. The state-owned telecom company Telekom Slovenije also scrapped plans—originally backed by the SDS—to sell its media arm, SioINET, to Hungarian business interests. Instead, the government appointed a new editor-in-chief credited with restoring editorial balance.

Elsewhere, Slovenia’s news agency STA gained a financial lifeline without politically motivated performance hurdles. A new bill ensured that public funds would be available if commercial revenues fell short, protecting STA from being weaponized through funding threats.

These actions paid off. By 2024, the State Media Monitor had reclassified RTVLO as Independent Public media, while STA and SioINET were upgraded to Independent State-Funded Media and Independent State Media, respectively—a clean sweep for Slovenia’s liberal government in the battle for media freedom.

No party has a monopoly on press freedom

In Europe, public media often double as political battlefields. From editorial reshuffles to legislative overhauls, the toolkit of media capture is vast—and bipartisan. While right-wing populists like Fico and Janša have been more brazen in their efforts to dominate the airwaves, left-leaning parties are not immune to temptation. Spain’s PSOE has also been accused of stacking RTVE with allies and changing laws to secure control.

What emerges is not a partisan divide, but a structural vulnerability. Public media are often financially and institutionally tied to the very governments they are meant to hold to account.

If independence is to be more than a talking point, reform must go deeper. That means delinking public funding from political favor, diversifying board appointments—perhaps by involving NGOs or academia—and enshrining editorial autonomy in law. Without such safeguards, journalists will remain in the crosshairs, and the public—who ultimately fund these outlets—will continue to pay the price.

Photo by Brian Wertheim on Unsplash (MJRC uses Unsplash+).