Government Censorship of the Media

Every year in one file, one row per country per year: media-censorship-all-editions-nations-inquiry.csv

Every column in the newest file of Government Censorship of the Media: what it holds, how it is stored, and its range.

Column	What it holds	Stored as	Range, 2025	Distinct	Empty	Spread
CountrycountryName	The country’s name, as this file spells it.	Text	—	176	0
ISO Codecountry_codeIdentifier	The ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code, added by this site. Every table here joins on it.	Text · 3 letters	—	176	0
Freedom from government media censorship (latent scale)media_censorshipHeadline	The headline figure: Original latent estimate (≈ −3 to +3.5); higher = less censorship.	Number · up to 3 decimals	-3.017South Sudan3.489Belgiummiddle 0.565	174	0

Profiled from the newest file. Range: the lowest and highest value, with the country holding it when only one does. Spread: countries in ten equal steps from lowest to highest. A higher value is the better result.

The newest 12 of 36 years.

Not in this dataset · 49 places this site covers

V-Dem Institute gives no figure for these in any year held here. It is the publisher’s choice of scope, and each place’s profile shows what is measured.

American SamoaAndorraAnguillaAntigua and BarbudaArubaBahamasBelizeBermudaBritish Virgin IslandsBruneiCayman IslandsChannel IslandsCook IslandsCuraçaoDominicaFaroe IslandsFrench PolynesiaGibraltarGreenlandGrenadaGuamIsle of ManKiribatiLiechtensteinMacauMarshall IslandsMicronesiaMonacoMontserratNauruNew CaledoniaNiueNorthern CyprusNorthern Mariana IslandsPalauPalestinePuerto RicoSaint Kitts and NevisSaint LuciaSaint MartinSaint Vincent and the GrenadinesSamoaSan MarinoSint MaartenTongaTurks and Caicos IslandsTuvaluUnited States Virgin IslandsVatican City

1. 1 · Publisher

   V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg

   v-dem.net

2. 2 · Their file

   Government Censorship of the Media 2025

   V-Dem-CY-Core-v16_csv.zip

3. 3 · Read by this site

   September 26, 2026

   Imported by a script that parses each figure and writes it down unrounded.

4. 4 · Stored as

   36 files, one per year

   Each downloads as a CSV, or every year together as media-censorship-all-editions-nations-inquiry.csv

5. 5 · Used on

   Its statistic page, and every profile it measures

   /statistics/media-censorship

From the V-Dem Institute's Country-Year Core dataset (v16), University of Gothenburg, published under CC BY-SA 4.0. V-Dem's data runs back to 1789; the series here starts in 1990 so that every row belongs to a present-day country. Stored as the measurement model's original estimate, not V-Dem's 0–4 rescaling.