Media freedom monitoring
Monitoring media freedom has been one of MISA Lesotho core activities since the organisation’s establishment in 1995.
To do this, we compile and publish accurate and detailed media violations and victories: that is, we record media freedom abuses as well as progress towards a free, independent, diverse and pluralistic media as envisaged by the Windhoek Declaration.
Media violations are issued in the form of alerts to educate people about the nature of the abuse and highlight trends. Alerts can also serve as advocacy tools and inform research to help influence changes to legislation and policy, as well as help bring perpetrators to justice.
Media violations include:
- when journalists are physically or verbally assaulted, threatened, injured, kidnapped, disappear, arrested, killed, censored, denied credentials or wrongfully expelled during the course of their work or as a direct result of their work
- when news outlets are attacked, illegally searched, censored, closed by force, raided, unable to report, broadcast or publish because of factors such as the confiscation of equipment, blocking of their online site or the jamming of transmissions
- when new legislation or changes to legislation hinder journalists from conducting their work freely and without fear.
We use this information to compile the MISA regional report, So this is Democracy? which ranks and measures the performance of Lesotho against other countries in the Southern African region.
Media freedom monitoring news from our chapters
“See the Person First”: Overhauling Disability Reporting in Lesotho
Nicole Tau When a citizen cannot enter a government building to access basic services, the limitation is not in their physical form. The limitation is in the architecture. When a voter cannot cast a ballot because a polling station lacks a ramp, the deficit belongs to...
ALTERED: Digitally manipulated video falsely shows South African woman physically assaulting a foreign shop owner
Nicole Tau A video (archived here) shared on Facebook claims to show a South African woman physically assaulting the owner of a foreign-run spaza shop, an informal township grocery store, during an argument over business licenses and regulatory compliance. In the...
FALSE: School closure in Eastern Cape isn’t due to deportation of foreign nationals
Nicole Tau A video on Facebook with a caption claiming that schools in South Africa's Eastern Cape are closing because foreign nationals are being deported is false. The video, which is seemingly from legitimate news footage, carried the text: “Eastern Cape Schools...
Who Gets to Call It “News”? The Fight for Real Journalism in Lesotho
Nicole Tau Every journalist eventually has to accept a basic truth: people enter this field for vastly different reasons. Some are driven by a noble duty to inform, while others are motivated by influence, sensation, or profit. That is simply human nature. But what...
FALSE: Lesotho’s 2026 Census Results Have Not Yet Been Released
The circulating figures are unverified, demographically inaccurate, and do not originate from official data. Nicole Tau A viral Facebook post claiming that Lesotho’s 2026 Population and Housing Census recorded a population of 2.1 million people, including 600,000 men...