News media of the Middle East and North Africa

This is the one region where ownership and licensing, rather than editorial line, are the decisive variables. A large part of the pan-Arab press is published from outside the country it covers — London, Dubai, Doha — because that is where it can be published. State, ruling-family or politically connected ownership is common enough to be the sensible default assumption rather than a discovery. And satellite broadcasting made the audience genuinely transnational decades before the internet did, so a single channel in a single language is watched across twenty borders at once. The consequence for anyone comparing front pages is that the interesting axis is usually not left against right within one country. It is one state's outlet against another's, in the same language, on the same event.

Of the 99 outlets tracked across the Middle East and North Africa, Crosswire places 3 on the left, 89 near the centre and 7 on the right. In 2 of the 20 countries here the press carries outlets on all three sides at once — the markets where a left-centre-right comparison can be made without leaving the country. In 17, every tracked title is classified centre.

The directory lists no public-service broadcaster anywhere in the Middle East and North Africa. State-funded broadcasting is not what is missing — a public-service remit is: a charter to serve the whole public independently of the government of the day, which is the thing Crosswire's "public broadcaster" label marks. News agencies account for 10 of the Middle East and North Africa's outlets, and agency copy is written to be resold to outlets across the spectrum, which makes it the plainest available baseline for spotting the framing a newsroom adds on top.

This is an approximate orientation, not a definitive judgement — and not a rating of quality or accuracy. How leanings are classified. Figures are counted from the outlet directory itself and change as it does; last reviewed 2026-08-17.

Hold the language constant and vary the state. Because so much of this region's press is Arabic-language and circulates across borders, you can put two outlets side by side that are writing for overlapping audiences in the same words and disagreeing completely — which strips out the translation problem that makes cross-border comparison hard everywhere else. The second move is to read a country's domestic-language outlet against an English-language title aimed at an international readership: the two are frequently making different arguments about the same week, for different people. Crosswire's left, centre and right labels fit this region less well than any other, and the limits of that classification are worth reading before you lean on it here.

Membership follows the World Bank's Middle East & North Africa grouping, with Türkiye added and Malta and Djibouti removed. Sudan, Somalia, Mauritania and the Comoros are grouped with Africa despite Arab League membership; Cyprus is grouped with Europe. The full taxonomy, and why Crosswire departs from the UN's scheme in one place, is set out on the regions index.