The opening of the country and its democratic transition, which began in the mid-2000s, were accompanied by the emergence of privately owned publications such as The Bhutan Times, The Bhutanese and Bhutan Observer. The country’s main daily newspaper, Kuensel, published in Dzongkha and English, is 51 per cent state-owned. The state broadcaster, the Bhutan Broadcasting Service, lacks its own special status guaranteeing editorial independence. As for the digital sphere, it is booming, and information is increasingly circulating on blogs and social media. 

The Himalayan kingdom has been ruled by the Buddhist Wangchuck dynasty since 1907. Bhutan's constitutional monarchy was established by the 2008 Constitution, which proclaims press freedom. However, the alternation between the different political parties does not seem to have any impact on press freedom in the country, where self-censorship remains pervasive.

The 2018 Information, Communications and Media Act confirmed the powers of the Bhutan Infocomm and Media Authority (BICMA), a media regulator whose five members are directly appointed by the government. Journalists report difficulties getting access to state-held and governmental information, which ultimately deprives the population of information of public interest. Recent defamation suits and a national security law penalising any attempt to create “misunderstanding or hostility between the government and the people” have acted as a major brake on journalistic freedom. 

Privately owned publications survive in a difficult economic environment, with a relatively low readership and insufficient advertising. Advertising revenue distributed by public bodies is mostly allocated to public media. In 2012, the government was accused of reducing advertising spending for The Bhutanese, a weekly newspaper, in retaliation for an article listing cases of corruption. This served as a warning to all media outlets.

In the land of “gross national happiness,” self-censorship is one of the main problems: many journalists avoid covering sensitive issues for fear of appearing to challenge the social order. Foreign journalists visiting Bhutan are not permitted to conduct independent reporting, particularly in the southern districts, which were previously dominated by the Lhotshampa, a Nepali-speaking minority whose situation receives very little media coverage. More than 100,000 members of this community were expelled from the territory in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At least thirty political prisoners — mostly from this minority — are detained in the country’s prisons, some of them for over 30 years.

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 launched by political activists who combine disinformation, defamation, and personal and/or racist attacks. A telling example: independent journalist Namgay Zam, former presenter of the state-owned Bhutan Broadcasting Service (BBS), was accused, in 2016, of defamation in retaliation for her investigation into a prominent businessman.