ABSTRACT
Throughout almost a century, the Moroccan press has remained a tool at the heart of politics. From the nationalist movement’s struggle with colonization and opposition political parties’ struggle with Hassan II’s regime to the post-1999 era, Morocco witnessed periods of authoritarian control and periods of reformist tendencies. This chapter traces the main developments in the Moroccan press. The chapter describes the business models, audience share, and the advertising market and delineates the various legal documents that regulate the Moroccan press and the recent initiatives for self-regulation. We argue that the journey of the press was confronted with more constraints than opportunities: an intransigent political establishment, a thorny regulatory framework, bureaucratic and structural hurdles, inequitable advertising markets, restrained access to information, limited audiences and readership, administrative censorship, and excessive self-censorship. The Coronavirus pandemic seems to have speeded up the demise of print media and bolstered the centrality of broadcast and digital platforms for news dissemination and reception. As for state/media relations, the chapter addresses the extent to which recent media reforms represent a break with the past and are aligned with the stated democratization ambitions, or represent an illustration of the cyclical fluctuation that has characterized the government-media relationship and freedoms of expression and information in general for the last decades.
