Morocco’s overhaul of its national press regulator has hit a wall of controversy. The Moroccan Federation of Newspaper Publishers said this week that dozens of its member outlets were unfairly shut out of the ongoing renewal of the National Press Council, after a temporary oversight committee rejected 69 of the 74 applications the federation had submitted on behalf of newspaper owners seeking a seat at the table.
According to the federation, the process started smoothly enough: an early notice flagged minor paperwork issues in just six files. Then, within days, the tone shifted sharply. The same committee came back with a far longer list, ruling 69 applications non-compliant and giving publishers, the federation says, no realistic window to fix the alleged deficiencies.
Federation officials say they pressed the committee for extra time and a single point of contact who could spell out exactly what was missing from each file. Those requests, they say, went unanswered. Undeterred, the federation kept submitting supporting documents for roughly sixty publishers anyway, only to learn that just five applications ultimately cleared the bar.
Much of the dispute centers on one recurring rejection reason: alleged gaps in social security contributions. The federation calls that argument especially hard to swallow, since the Moroccan state has itself covered those contributions on behalf of the press sector since 2020, a subsidy meant to keep struggling newsrooms afloat, not to trip them up in a regulatory review.
For the federation, the stakes go well beyond paperwork. Excluding the vast majority of newspaper publishers from the council’s renewal, it argues, threatens to skew the balance of a body meant to reflect the full diversity of Morocco’s media landscape, print, digital, and broadcast alike. The organization says it intends to challenge the committee’s decision in court and is calling on press freedom advocates, both domestic and international, to weigh in.
Created in 2018, the National Press Council issues professional press cards, oversees journalistic ethics, and serves as the profession’s official interlocutor with the government. Its current renewal process, months in the making, is meant to seat a fresh slate of representatives for journalists, editors, and publishers alike, a vote whose outcome will shape the balance of power in a print industry already squeezed by falling revenues.
The provisional committee had not publicly responded to the federation’s accusations at the time of writing.
