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Under Mohammad Yunus’s interim government, a Media Reform Commission has set out to address long-standing problems facing journalists in Bangladesh – but old threats and patterns of control remain

SINCE SHEIKH HASINA was overthrown in August 2024, the Bangladeshi media has entered an uncertain new phase. The biggest threat to the media – Hasina’s dictatorship – may no longer be there, but a climate of repression and self-censorship built up over decades is taking a long time to die. The newspaper editor MahfuzAnam described the situation as “slippery”, adding that “journalism in Bangladesh has to navigate a very dangerous course, with forces we don’t know.”

A Media Reform Commission recently delivered its report to the chief advisor to Bangladesh’s interim government, Mohammad Yunus; that report has set out to address long-standing threats to media freedom in Bangladesh. These include inadequate legal protections, monopolistic ownership and a lack of effective regulation. The commission has addressed those conditions, filling the gaps that have historically left journalists vulnerable. It has recommended a comprehensive set of measures, which, if implemented, would go a long way towards ensuring a free press in Bangladesh. It has provided an invaluable blueprint, at least parts of which can be enacted immediately.

Bangladesh has made sincere attempts at media reform before, in 1984 and 1996, but those fell victim to the failure of the country’s institutions. The future of its media will therefore depend on how durable the Yunus government’s reforms prove to be. In the meantime, the old vulnerabilities persist as old patterns prove difficult to shake off.

IN THE PAST, the country’s media ecosystem has prioritised volume over quality: there are today over 50 daily newspapers and 42 news channels in Bangladesh. A small number of these outlets produce accurate, objective journalism, and operate on a financially sustainable business model. Examples include the country’s two largest newspapers, the Bengali-language Prothom Alo and the English-language Daily Star – both owned by the same business conglomerate, the Transcom Group – which have generally sought to uphold independent, ethical journalism, although they still have detractors on all sides of the country’s consistently fractious politics. Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that both newspapers deliver a profit: they and their editors are consistently the highest taxpayers in the media sector.

Most Bangladeshi media outlets are not designed to deliver a profit or produce good journalism. Rather, they are designed to serve their owner’s interests. Most of them are owned by large conglomerates, for whom the media business is only a small component of their diversified interests. These big business groups became an integral part of Hasina’s regime, receiving favours and bestowing support in return as their power grew during her 15 years in office. Many business houses had overt political ties, counting MPs and ministers of the ruling party among their directors and shareholders. Since in Bangladesh publications must have a government-issued licence, a large number of media houses were opened after 2009, during Hasina’s second period in office, by individuals or corporations associated with her party, the Awami League. Hasina’s government also controlled advertising revenue through both formal and informal means; its leverage over businesses and its control over the mechanism for television ratings allowed it to allocate advertising revenue to favoured outlets.

One media entrepreneur described the oligarchs’ approach to media as “carrot and stick”: you could use your television channel or newspaper as a vehicle to win favours via positive coverage or the platforming of the government’s pet projects; conversely, it could be a form of insurance against any challenge from business rivals, political leaders or members of the public via the threat of a possible smear campaign. As Nurul Kabir, the editor of the outspoken English-language daily New Age, explained, “Newspaper ownership creates nuisance value, so your bargaining power with the government enhances.”

Anam believes that he and his paper, the Daily Star, are falling victim to just such a smear campaign. The Bashundhara Group is one of Bangladesh’s largest and most powerful conglomerates; it controls multiple vital industries, essential commodities, and a whole suburb of Dhaka. It also owns three newspapers and two television channels. The Daily Star covered stories relating to the death of a young woman in a case connected to AnvirSobhan, the son of the conglomerate’s chairman. Subsequently, the newspaper was hit with what Anam described as a “blitzkrieg” by the Bashundhara Group’s media businesses. On 23 February 2025, three of the group’s newspapers published the same headline critical of the Daily Star and its sister paper, Prothom Alo.

This is “a particularly crass instance of a proprietor owning three newspapers like he owns factories,” Anam said. “He thinks he can use it like a weapon to instigate the things he wants.” The East West Media Group, the media wing of the Bashundhara Group, did not respond to questions for this story.

The Media Reform Commission has sought to address this with a “One House One Media” policy that is meant to guard against media monopolies. This entails restrictions on cross-ownership of outlets across different mediums – for instance, the same person owning both a television station and a newspaper – as well as on ownership of multiple outlets of the same kind of media – say, several news platforms in the same language. The commission has also recommended that media companies above a certain size be listed publicly on the stock market, which would prevent overwhelming control of these companies by single individuals or business houses.

However, the implementation of any of the reforms put forward by the interim government remains uncertain; many will have to be implemented by the next elected government, whose composition, character and buy-in remain uncertain. Yunus has signalled his willingness to take action, but, in this case, media reform would entail a large-scale flogging of private or corporate assets – measures that would run counter to the interests of multi-sector conglomerates that remain powerful in Bangladesh today.

The commission has also addressed other underlying issues in the country’s media, such as the poor representation and treatment of women. “The industry is very male dominated,” SaydiaGulrukh, a member of the editorial team at New Age, told me. One result is that “women are often not given interesting ‘beats’ – they are given women’s stories or entertainment, not given complicated political stories,” she said. Moreover, media houses rarely have effective mechanisms in place to address complaints of sexual harassment or gender discrimination. 

The media in Bangladesh has also struggled with women’s representation. “Most of the time, women’s voices are not heard,” Gitiara Nasreen, a member of the Media Reform Commission, said. “When women are there, they are not consulted or interviewed about news as experts – they are mostly portrayed as victims, not considered people at large.” In response to this, the commission has mandated guidelines for women’s participation and representation. As Nasreen put it, these include “infrastructural changes from toilets to transport.”

Amid an uncertain security situation with the country’s transition away from Hasina’s authoritarian rule, women journalists in Bangladesh are at increased risk from members of the public. The women journalists I spoke to voiced concerns about empowered extremist elements and a rise in attacks on women on the streets of Dhaka and other cities. This affects women journalists’ ability to do their jobs, and is also indicative of a wider trend of attacks on both journalists and women.

SEVEN MONTHS after Hasina’s fall, the interim government has failed to get a grip on law and order. A recent statement by human-rights organisations including Amnesty International noted “with alarm” that “the month of February saw a spate of violent attacks against journalists.” These attacks might come from protesters, political activists, or thugs paid by local interests. “The threat from the mob is very very real, and there’s no logic to what provokes the flare ups,” the Daily Star reporter Zyma Islam said.

For example, on 5 February, an organised group of protesters using both industrial excavators and hand-held tools demolished the house of Bangladesh’s first prime minister and Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Reporters told me they felt unsafe wearing press cards at the scene. “The message was, ‘You’re next’,” Islam said. The demolition was part of a coordinated attack on sites across the country associated with the former regime. Journalists in districts beyond Dhaka are at particular risk; law enforcement and institutional protection are in little evidence outside the capital.

This is made worse by the influence of the expatriate Bangladeshi YouTube stars Pinaki Bhattacharya and Elias Hossain, who rail against members of the press (and much else) to their millions of followers inside the country. They have targeted Prothom Alo and the Daily Star, leading to intimidatory demonstrations outside the newspapers’ offices. In one video, Hossain baselessly accused Agence France-Presse’s Dhaka bureau chief, Sheikh SabihaAlam, of “Islamophobia” – a highly inflammatory suggestion in the devoutly Muslim country. She made light of it when we spoke – “At least they chose a good photo of me” – but knows the risk is real. “After that, my inbox was flooded with death threats, so I had to take down my Facebook account,” she said. Alam filed a police complaint and hired someone to protect her daughters.

The interim government has been seen as going easy on organised crowd mobilisation. Kabir said this perception stems from the fact that “a section of the student leaders have connections” with those responsible for the violence, while Yunus “has said the students are his employers.” The interim government came to power in August on the back of a massive popular movement against Hasina spearheaded by a disparate coalition of activists, including students, and it continues to derive its authority partly from their support, leaving it unclear which groups and actions enjoy official or semi-official sanction. After the organised demolition of Mujibur Rahman’s house-turned-museum in the heart of Dhaka, less than five kilometres from Yunus’s own residence, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these mobs have been deliberately allowed free rein. As Islam pointed out, this has an injurious effect on media freedom: “If there are mobs threatening the physical safety of media institutions, then they are automatically made reliant on the government for their safety, and that interferes with their core responsibility to hold state forces accountable.”

Newspapers such as Prothom Alo and the Daily Star have been given police protection by the interim government. MahfujAlam, the student leader who is now the de-facto head of the ministry of information and broadcasting, dismissed security concerns, telling me that media houses “have no need to worry about their safety” since they receive adequate police protection. It is ironic that the Prothom Alo office was placed under the protection of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) – the same elite paramilitary force that, according to the country’s commission on enforced disappearances, has been responsible for a string of abuses over the preceding two decades. A fact-finding report on Bangladesh by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recently recommended that the RAB be disbanded due to its role in these violations.

THE RAB’S SWITCH from abuser to protector is one many in the media will feel uncomfortable about given the Bangladeshi security forces’ history of intimidating journalists. In the past, journalists were routinely called in by intelligence agencies, such as the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence. These invitations were designed to send a message, either implicitly or explicitly. One reporter told me that, in 2019, an intelligence officer issued a thinly veiled threat to them: “You have a lovely family – why do you take so many risks?”

Kabir recalled: “My wife regularly received phone calls saying, ‘Shut your husband’s mouth otherwise you will see that your children are disappeared’.” He took precautions, but considered the risks “a professional hazard in a country like ours.” There were also deliberate punishments for journalists who proved troublesome. In 2021, Sheikh SabihaAlam recalled, she had recordings of her private calls leaked to Facebook accounts affiliated with the ruling party. Numerous journalists had to leave the country, temporarily or permanently, due to perceived threats from the security forces.

In other cases, editors have received gentle requests from government or security officials to cover or suppress particular stories. Some editors would sometimes entertain these requests, while at other times they would not, depending on their calculation of the level of risk involved. Kabir said that such compromises always have consequences. “No lunch is a free lunch,” he told me. “I have strong feeling that most editors do it because of their tendency to entertain self-censorship.” Running afoul of the security forces could have consequences both for the safety of individual employees and the survival of the outlet as a whole. Many trade-offs were made over the years by journalists and editors forced to decide between exile and compromise.

There is no suggestion that the security forces have sought overtly to intimidate journalists since Hasina’s fall. But there is as yet no guarantee that they will not do so in future. Crucially, the old tools of official repression are still very much intact. Efforts at ensuring the security forces accountability for violations have so far proven patchy; apart from the transfer of senior personnel, these forces have not been reformed. Except for one particularly high-profile perpetrator, no serving army officer has yet been charged for rights violations committed over the last 15 years. According to the commission of inquiry on enforced disappearances, 12 arrest warrants against retired and suspended members of the security forces were issued in late January but have yet to be served. 

The international rights organisation Human Rights Watch warned in January that, “without urgent structural reform, the abuses of the past could quickly become a blueprint for Bangladesh’s future.” Since the intimidation of journalists in Bangladesh is purely extrajudicial, it is not so easy to reform. The Media Reform Commission has proposed an independent regulatory body, the Press Commission, endowed with the powers of a civil court to adjudicate on journalists’ concerns. While it will in theory be able to censure the security forces for undue interference, its efficacy will depend on the future health of the rule of law in Bangladesh.

A LARGE PART of the intimidation of the media in the past was directly ordered by Hasina’s government. For example, there was a concerted campaign against the Daily Star and Prothom Alo that can only have been politically motivated. Anam was named in 84 court cases in more than 50 districts of the country, meaning he had to spend a considerable amount of his time either in court or travelling for court appearances. After a Prothom Alo journalist, Shamsuzzaman Shams, was detained in 2023 over a seemingly innocuous story about rising food prices, he was charged under the Digital Security Act, one of the former government’s favourite tools to use against its opponents. The act’s extremely broad wording and coercive powers allowed the government to arrest almost anyone it wanted for speech offences.

With a compromised judiciary, the outcome of these cases would be dictated by political concerns. For example, the celebrated photojournalist Shahidul Alam was arrested and tortured in 2018 but was eventually released on bail, due in part to the international outcry over such a flagrant rights violation. “I don’t think they realised how well-connected Shahidul Alam was,” Islam said. “They would always go so far, but not one step further.” While Shahidul Alam was eventually released, the writer Mushtaq Ahmed died in detention in 2021 after being charged under the same Digital Security Act and denied bail six times. 

The government was able to victimise journalists in this way because the law allowed it to; the present legal framework governing media freedom and freedom of expression in Bangladesh is woefully inadequate, allowing the government wide powers to block or penalise speech deemed unacceptable for a variety of reasons. The Media Reform Commission has called to bring these laws in line with international standards by repealing or amending them. It has also recommended a new “Journalists’ Protection Law” that will allow journalists to use a public-interest defence in court, overriding legal objections from state or non-state actors in cases where they can prove they are acting in the public interest. The Digital Security Act has already been repealed, but it is uncertain whether any new laws will provide adequate protection against abuses similar to those it once allowed.

Moreover, one of the reasons why past governments resorted to such draconian measures is that there is a real problem in Bangladesh of unethical and irresponsible journalism. There is currently no effective way for individuals to obtain redress for irresponsible reporting that causes them harm short of going to court for defamation or using blunt instruments such as the Digital Security Act and its successors, which could be abused in bad faith with the support of the powers that be. To that end, the reform commission has recommended an independent oversight body, the National Press Commission, be set up to handle complaints from journalists or members of the public against media outlets or any state or non-state actors.

This would replace the old Press Council, set up in 1974, which Nasreen described as a “paper tiger”, without adequate funding or staff and with limited powers. Though the proposed new commission would have “a bigger scope – if journalists face extra-judicial harassment or problems from their own office, then the commission will handle complaints,” Nasreen explained. If it is set up and given adequate resources, it can help ensure that independent journalism thrives in Bangladesh, but the overall health of the media in the country will remain a matter of political will. It will also depend on whether the interim government can succeed in strengthening the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary. That is still an open question.

One area that has so far proven resistant to reform is the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). This remote, densely-wooded territory in southeastern Bangladesh, on the border with India and Myanmar, is home to minority indigenous communities. It has historically had a measure of self-rule, but, since the late 1970s, Bengali Muslim settlers from the plains have enjoyed official favour, leading to a rumbling, decades-long guerrilla war between different Adivasi militant groups and the Bangladeshi army.

Foreign journalists are not allowed inside the CHT and all movement along the territory’s roads is tightly controlled by the army. Bangladeshi news outlets generally do not platform indigenous voices or provide in-depth coverage of the CHT for a number of reasons. Adivasis are ill-represented in the mainstream media and the country’s Bengali-dominated media outlets are unwilling to incur the wrath of military authorities. Any news must necessarily be gathered by local Adivasi reporters, who are especially vulnerable to intimidation by security forces and settler groups since they and their families must carry on living in the area. Media freedom is more or less meaningless in the CHT, which is still dominated by the military. “This will not change in the near future,” SaydiaGulrukh, a New Age journalist who has covered Adivasi issues, said. “Changing it would mean dismantling the unique case of settler occupation that the Bangladeshi state has in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.”

Even today, six months after the Monsoon Revolution that toppled Hasina, journalists in Bangladesh continue to face insecurity on multiple levels. Their jobs and livelihoods are precarious, they are vulnerable to intimidation from sections of the public, and they are powerless in the face of their owners’ political repositioning. Moreover, the continuing impunity of the security forces renders journalists vulnerable to extra-judicial intimidation, since, without the rule of law, there can be no guarantee of journalists’ safety. And old habits die hard: Bangladeshi journalists and editors continue to practice various forms of self-censorship, bred of years of caution and intimidation. Under Yunus, Bangladesh has embarked on an ambitious programme of reform aimed at remaking the country’s institutions. But, until these reforms are implemented and consolidated, the old problems will remain. △

Cyrus Naji was educated at the University of Oxford and the University of St Andrews. From 2022 to 2023, he was a teaching fellow at the Asian University for Women, a private university in Chittagong.

This article was originally published on Hemal.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy.