Malaysia
Malaysia’s contemporary media landscape is currently characterised by a sharp paradox. The long-awaited Malaysian Media Council finally became operational in 2025, offering the prospect of genuine self-regulation for the first time in decades, yet a succession of incidents – physical attacks on journalists and arrests linked to reporting – have tested those hopes.
The passing of the Malaysian Media Council Act saw the establishment of the Malaysian Media Council (MMC) in June 2025. Its elected Governing Board comprises representatives from media companies, journalists, broadcasters, civil society organisations (CSOs), academics, and government agencies. This marks a departure from decades of government-led media oversight.
The MMC has moved quickly to take public positions on press freedom incidents. In January, it called the arrest of journalist Rex Tan for asking a question deemed racially sensitive at a public lecture on Gaza ‘unnecessary and punitive’ and demanded his immediate release.1
Events such as a daytime attack on sports journalist Haresh Deol in November 2025 have caused further unease among journalists. Deol had been reporting on the Football Association of Malaysia’s (FAM) heritage-player document scandal, in which FIFA sanctioned FAM and seven players for forgery and falsification linked to eligibility documents. Deol said two men attacked him while a third filmed the incident, prompting concern among media freedom groups such as Gerakan Media Merdeka about possible intimidation. Police subsequently arrested a suspect, who was charged with assault and criminal intimidation, pleaded guilty, and was later fined MYR 2,000 (about US$500).
The major recent policy development has been the implementation in January 2026 of the Online Safety Act (OSA) 2025, which extends regulatory oversight of platforms. It means major platforms such as TikTok and Instagram are now automatically subject to a wider set of Malaysian laws. The government has said that, with the rapid expansion of digital media, the OSA will enhance the protection of children, prevent online scams, and help in combating fraud. However, at least three media freedom CSOs, the Centre for Independent Journalism (CIJ), Article 19, and Sinar Project, issued a lengthy statement decrying this latest move by the government. For them, `the risk of abuse and selective enforcement is high, with growing evidence of targeted suppression or arbitrary takedowns’.2
Malaysiakini, the country’s oldest independent news portal, endured a troubled year. Having already laid off staff as part of a restructuring exercise announced in 2024, it was rocked in March 2026 by the discovery that MYR 3m (approximately US$750,000) had been diverted from its subsidiaries by former employees to entities suspected by the company of running unlicensed investment schemes. The funds represented a significant part of the company’s reserves built up over more than a decade.
Around a third (32%) of Malaysians now access content from influencers and content creators who are focused on the news. The major influencers are popular, often young(ish) politicians and activists. Former UMNO (United Malays National Organisation) youth head, Khairy Jamaluddin, has his weekly Keluar Sekejap podcast, and retired politician and technocrat Idris Jala and his son, Leon, also have a weekly podcast, The Game of Impossible. Both use Spotify as their platform. Activist Roshinee Mookaiah provides a more critical stance on Instagram. Together with former minister Rafizi Ramli, and with his Yang Berhenti Menteri podcast on YouTube, these influencers, sometimes with invited guests, provide interpretations and commentary on current news, which many consider refreshing, independent, and entertaining.
Elsewhere in the industry other individuals are also in the limelight. Astro Awani lost its young, enterprising Editor-in-Chief, Ashwad Ismail, to the national broadcaster RTM as its Director-General of Broadcasting. Malaysia’s Minister of Investment, Trade and Industry, Johari Abdul Ghani, who is a major shareholder (25%) of media giant Media Prima, saw his son, Amir Nashrin, join him on the shareholder list with his own acquisition of a 7.96% share in March.
Total advertising expenditure declined by 22% in 2025 and is expected to shrink a further 9.5% in 2026. Digital advertising expenditure plunged 39% in 2025, ‘amid intensifying competition from social media, search engines and live commerce platforms’.3
Artificial intelligence has allegedly compounded these pressures, with Media Chinese International Limited (MCIL), parent company of the main Chinese-language media Sin Chew Daily, China Press, and Nanyang Siang Pau, retrenching 44% of its workforce in mid-2025 as it integrated AI across its operations.4
Zaharom Nain
Allianz Centre for Governance, University of Malaya
Aril Mikhail
University of Nottingham Malaysia
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Changing media
Print has collapsed since 2017, from 45% to 14%. Television has also declined, from 54% to 36% over the past decade. Online news and social media for news have risen steadily since 2024.
Pay for online news
18%
(-)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
39%
(-)
Trust in news overall
30%
(-7)
Global average: 37%
Peaking at 41% in 2021, trust in news stood at 40% in 2023, likely reflecting optimism around a new reformist government, stabilised at 37% for two consecutive years, but dropped significantly to 30% this year, as the optimism appears to have waned. Broadcast brands, led by Astro Awani, remain the most trusted.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
95/180
Score 52.73
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 Majlis Media Malaysia/Malaysian Media Council, Press Statements and Council Announcements, June 2025–March 2026. https://majlismedia.my/
2 https://cijmalaysia.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Press-statement-on-eKYC.pdf
3 https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/highlight/2026/01/28/media-industry-to-face-a-milder-contraction-in-2026
4 https://www.campaignasia.com/article/media-chinese-to-layoff-44-employees-in-malaysia-and-replace-them-with-ai/43952l5x1a38knbzw5oilch4z0