Yemen
Yemen ranked 168 out of 180 on this year’s World Press Freedom Index (WPFI), an index which is published annually by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). This ranking is one place up from last year’s 169 place, but for the past decade, Yemen has consistently ranked in the bottom 10% of the index. The Middle Eastern Republic has dropped over 60 places since its highest placement at 103 in 2002 when the index first began coming out.
The WPFI compares the level of press freedom in 180 countries globally by evaluating data on abuses against journalists and feedback from a questionnaire. Their ranking reflects the degree of freedom that is available to media workers within each country.
Yemen has been ravaged by political conflict and regional violence for many years, but with the escalation into a civil war in late 2014, media freedom has suffered greatly. While the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have been leading an insurgency against the Yemeni military since 2004, the war officially began when the Houthi rebels seized control of Yemen’s capital city, Sanaa, as reported by the Global Conflict Tracker.
This civil war has contributed to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. With rampant starvation, violence against civilians, and a failing economy, the Committee to Project Journalists (CPJ) reports that Yemeni journalists and media outlets have been left struggling to stay afloat. However, a great majority of the struggles faced by media workers and organizations have been instigated by the political forces that continue to wreck the country.
“The media workers are more dangerous to our country than the nationalist and warring mercenaries,” said Abdelmalek al-Houthi, the leader of the Houthi rebels, in an article published on the Atlantic Council website. This hostile attitude toward the media has had significant repercussions for journalists and citizens alike.
“As a result, [journalists] experience barely any protection,” said Christopher Resch, a press officer for Reporters Without Borders (RSF), in an interview with DW’s Diana Hodali.
Since the beginning of the civil war in Yemen, there have been over 3,000 abuses committed towards journalists, according to the Yemeni Network for Rights and Freedoms. Many of the victims are foreign media workers, who are often threatened, abducted, placed on death row by the Houthi rebels, or killed indirectly in brutal ways.
A recent case that shook international news was the murder of pregnant reporter Rasha Abdullah al-Harazi in November 2022, who at that time was working for a TV channel based in the UAE, as reported by CPJ.
This animosity and heavy politicization of the media have been key factors behind the mass media shutdown that has ensued. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) reported that in 2023, out of the 365 media outlets that were functioning before the civil war, only about half are still operating– the majority of which are not independent.
A 2023 study published by the Yemeni Journalist Syndicate (YJS) on media independence and journalists’ rights illustrates the severity of this. According to YJS, one of the most significant contributors to poor media coverage in the country is the struggle for media independence. The study found that an overwhelming majority of the media outlets in the country are either owned directly or indirectly by the parties involved in the civil war. Out of 26 TV channels, 23 supported either side of the conflict; out of 60 radio stations, 42 were found to be affiliated with one of the parties.
This has led to severe underreporting and widespread misinformation on the devastation that the war has brought. According to the Atlantic Council, both international and Yemeni audiences receive a distorted view of the war, and in turn, form opinions that are heavily driven by antagonism and regionalism.
These opinions have fueled the dehumanization of the other side and reduced willingness to comply with local and national reconciliation deals, as reported by Yemeni journalist Afrah Nasser for the Atlantic Council.
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Amelia Delevski is a student at the American University in Bulgaria double-majoring in Journalism and Business Administration. She is interested in researching press freedom around the world.
