When the press is muzzled, it is not journalists who pay the highest price.
It is the person worrying about basic necessities. Power outages.
The village dealing with a meth crisis amongst its own youth. Employment shortages.
The parents navigating a dilapidated hospital with medicine shortages.
The dehumanisation of queuing for hours to get cash handouts under the guise of community development.
People who are left making decisions about their lives with incomplete, or worse, manipulated information.
It’s the quiet compliance that this is good enough because it is what it is.
That is the real cost of a media environment that closes in around the press. Not to newsrooms. To everyone else.
Yesterday, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released their 25th World Press Freedom Index.
Samoa dropped 15 spots – from 44th to 59th out of 180 countries.
The numbers are worth sitting with.
RSF doesn’t rank countries based on headlines or political mood.
Their assessors look at conditions on the ground: the legal environment journalists operate in, the political pressure they face, the economic precarity of the media sector, and how safe it actually is to ask difficult questions of powerful people.
In other words, they measure the gap between what a government says about press freedom and what it actually does.
Samoa’s legal indicator fell from 72nd to 86th.
Its political indicator from 54th to 69th.
Its security indicator from 49th to 68th.
The numbers paint a picture of a media environment that, over the past year, became measurably more hostile to journalism.
Anyone who has been paying attention will not be shocked.
For context: the RSF index defines press freedom as journalists’ ability to independently select, produce, and disseminate news in the public interest – free from political, economic, legal, or social interference, and without threats to their physical or mental safety.
Here is what often gets lost in debates about media freedom: it is not primarily about journalists. Journalists are simply the mechanism.
What erodes when press freedom erodes is the public’s right to the truth. To know what is being done in their name.
When a government controls who gets access, it controls what gets asked.
When it controls what gets asked, it shapes what gets reported. When what gets reported is shaped by political or personal agendas, the rest of us are navigating blind and by faith in the goodwill of the powerful.
#my2sene is that is the real cost. Not to newsrooms, but to the everyday people who require the best of their government.
Globally, the picture is no more encouraging.
In 21 of the 32 countries in Asia-Pacific, press freedom is rated either “difficult” or “very serious”, making it one of the most repressive regions globally, and the situation is worsening.
New Zealand sits at 22nd as the region’s top performer, even as it slips six places. The average score across all 180 countries has never been lower.
The legal indicator recorded the sharpest global decline this year, deteriorating in more than 60 percent of countries assessed – 110 out of 180.
Countries including India (157th), Egypt (169th), Israel (116th), and Georgia (135th) were among those that slid backwards.
The criminalisation of journalism, driven by the misuse of emergency powers, common law, and workarounds to press legislation, is no longer a regional problem – it is a global one.
For that bastion of freedom – the USA – a quarter century on from the September 11 attacks, the expansion of national security and state secrecy provisions has quietly become one of the most effective tools for suppressing journalism in the public interest.
What began as a trend concentrated in authoritarian states has since taken hold in democracies, too.
It is easy to read that and feel distant from it.
To picture the usual bogeymen: authoritarian regimes, junta-led states, countries where journalists are imprisoned or killed for doing their jobs (think Palestine, where, since October 2023, more than 220 journalists have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, including at least 70 slain while carrying out their work).
Countries that are nothing like us. Right?
A look at Samoa’s RSF rankings over the last decade tells its own story.
2026 — 59th
2025 — 44th
2024 — 22nd
2023 — 19th
2022 — 45th
2021 — 21st
2020 — 21st
2019 — 22nd
2018 — 22nd
2017 — 21st
2016 — 29th
The years 2016, 2021 and 2025 were election years.
After decades in power, HRPP lost in 2021, and FAST has been at the helm since then.
Each leadership transition brought instability to the media landscape. The drop under Laauli has been the sharpest – and the incidents that drove it the most documented.
This year’s ranking reflects conditions over the past year, spanning two governments.
Under FAST’s five-year tenure, the foundations of a more hostile media environment were laid: a sector with growing economic precarity, no functioning independent complaints body, and an institutional culture in which scrutiny was increasingly treated as an inconvenience rather than a democratic function.
But the most visible and damaging incidents of the past year: the Observer ban, the treason rhetoric in Parliament, the leaked protocols proposing political vetting of journalists and controlled questioning, the blocking of media access during Penny Wong and Christopher Luxon’s visits, all happened under Laaulialemalietoa’s watch.
He did not inherit a press freedom crisis. But he sure did deepen one.
Which brings us to the institutions that should have pushed back harder.
When the Prime Minister moved to exclude the nation’s only daily newspaper from government access, the Journalists’ Association of Samoa (JAWS) was exactly the one who should have led the unrelenting charge to restore the freedoms of all the press in the country.
But we didn’t really see that.
Instead, an unspoken acknowledgement of the separation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ media operators was allowed to happen.
That is, the ‘good’ ones get to stay and apologetically make their enquiries, while the ‘bad’ ones were shown the door.
That is the new structure, and it spits at the very core of the work we do – the freedom to question, follow-up, hold accountable and bring to the fore any issues that require the sun’s disinfecting rays and public scrutiny.
Now, the ‘good’ media have to coddle a government that is desperate to fast-track its own legend and historical significance, while the ‘bad’ media circle outside with their drones and weather vanes for a hint of blood in the water.
It has now been over six months since the Observer’s ban, with pending legal action against their journalists, an additional suspension against Newsline, and a public service and cabinet that routinely ignore requests for information, comment, and interviews.
The public perception, at least online, is fetid with contempt for the work of journalists.
JAWS’s impotence to effect any change is disappointing.
Is it a structural problem? Motivation?
Whatever it is, an association that relies on goodwill and relationships to function – in a small country where everyone knows everyone, where personal affiliations affect the bottom line, and where cultural expectations around deference to authority run deep – will always find it difficult to confront power directly.
That is not a criticism of individuals. It is a recognition of our environment.
The Samoa Media Council, the independent body designed to mediate disputes between stakeholders and the press, has been in limbo for some years.
In its absence, JAWS has been the proverbial suggestion box that often sits, inconspicuously, on a countertop at a busy doctor’s office. A handy receptacle for complaints that go nowhere.
The result is a media sector with no effective independent advocate, no functioning complaints body, and a planned state accreditation system controlled entirely by the office of the person journalists are meant to scrutinise.
That is a managed media environment.
But the RSF index is not a verdict on Samoa’s future. It is a record of its recent past.
There was a moment, a genuine one, when the change of government in August offered the possibility of course correction. Better access. A functioning Media Council. An accreditation process free from political interference. A government that treated scrutiny as a feature of democratic governance rather than a threat to it.
That moment has not been taken.
The irony is this: the tighter the noose, the more whistleblowers there are. The more the “leaks”.
Because, whether you accept it or not, power will always be challenged, and there should always be room for it in a democracy.
A managed and compliant media does not eliminate dissent. It just throws a wrung cloth over the embers. The heat remains.
To the journalists in Samoa who keep showing up – labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’, underappreciated, challenged, in survival mode – that stubbornness is something to be proud of.
But stubbornness without solidarity only goes so far. JAWS exists. The Media Council can be rebuilt. Accreditation does not have to be handed to the very office journalists are meant to scrutinise. These are not immovable conditions. They are choices – and they can be unmade.
That choice belongs to the government. The consequences belong to all of us.
