HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM — Critics warn that Vietnam’s ongoing push to restructure the country’s media will allow authorities to have tighter control over news outlets and more effectively spread propaganda.
The media restructuring started in 2019 when former Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc signed the “National Press Development and Management Planning until 2025” policy. According to the plan, 180 press organizations will be shut down, and 8,000 reporters and editors will lose their jobs.
Phil Robertson, director of Asia Human Rights and Labor Advocates, told VOA the media restructuring has become more severe under General Secretary To Lam, who took over as leader of the Communist Party after the July 2024 death of his predecessor, Nguyen Phu Trong.
“There’s little doubt that this so-called ‘reform’ will result in the Vietnamese people getting even less real news,” Robertson wrote in an email. “This is precisely the path one expects an authoritarian like To Lam to take, doubling down on government control of what the people hear and see.”
To Lam’s broader ambitions for government reform include consolidating 14 ministries into seven. Under the government’s plan, dubbed Resolution 18, each ministry will be allowed to have one official news publication, further cutting the number of news outlets in the country. The move could cut the number of news outlets in half, some analysts say.
The government plans to concentrate resources into six national media conglomerates. The six outlets include Nhan Dan — the newspaper of the Communist Party — as well as the outlets of the Defense Ministry and Public Security Ministry.
Vietnam Television will become the sole national television channel, absorbing smaller broadcasters. On Jan. 15, broadcasts for 13 channels operating under Vietnam Multimedia Corporation, or VTC, ended, along with Voice of Vietnam TV and Nhan Dan TV. VTC was the country’s second-most-popular television broadcaster and had been operating for 20 years.
One 21-year-old journalism student was working as an intern at VTC in Hanoi when it shut down at midnight on Jan. 15. He said all the staff gathered on the first floor and had a countdown until all the TV monitors were turned off. Afterwards, they had fireworks. He said approximately 1,000 VTC employees lost their jobs that night.
“Everyone was crying,” he said, asking to be referred to as Justin. “After 20 years working at the station, doing a lot of collaboration, doing a lot of programs, doing a lot of special news, they have been kicked out for no reason. That’s how they are feeling.”
A regular VTC viewer in northern Vietnam who described herself as a housewife said it’s painful to see the broadcast shuttered.
“Honestly, I don’t want any channel to close,” she wrote on Facebook in Vietnamese. “I consider those channels as family members. Losing a channel is like losing a person.”
‘Bitter medicine’
On Dec. 1, To Lam spoke during a national conference on the implementation of Resolution 18. He stated the restructuring is designed to streamline the political system and remove institutional bottlenecks.
“This is really a difficult issue,” To Lam said. “It will involve thoughts, feelings, aspirations and affect the interests of a number of individuals and organizations.
“The implementation in many units will certainly encounter difficulties,” the General Secretary said. “However, we still have to proceed because to have a healthy body, sometimes we have to ‘take bitter medicine.’”
Trinh Huu Long, a democracy advocate and co-founder of the Taiwan-based nonprofit Legal Initiatives for Vietnam, said the government is rushing to finalize its media restructuring and the consolidation of government ministries.
“Everyone is working around the clock,” he said. “They’re planning to finish everything in March, when the Congress will hold a special session to rubber stamp this massive restructure.”
Nguyen Hong Hai, a senior lecturer at Hanoi’s VinUniversity, told VOA that while working in the public sector, he saw the need for reform firsthand.
“There’s the fact that there are a lot of employees who are not working, in the real sense, and there’s a lot of waste,” he said. “Every society needs reforms. But the thing is, how to do it effectively?”
Justin, the journalism student in Hanoi, supports the government reforms although he said change is happening “too fast” and without new opportunities for those who lost their livelihoods. That includes his uncle, who worked for VTC for some 20 years.
“We have cried, but we still 100% agree with what the government decided,” he said. “We just want to comment, ‘Please, if you want to kick me out, give me a new job.’ … Do not change so rapidly so that people will be shocked, like right now, kicked out from the job and with no other proposal for the future.”
Pushing propaganda
Long said that as Hanoi focuses its resources into six national media conglomerates, authorities will have more power to push Hanoi’s agenda.
“The government will invest in a small number of state agencies to make them a lot more effective in propaganda,” Long said. “The number one function of every state-media outlet is to promote and defend the [Communist] Party. Serving readers is secondary.”
In a November 2024 report, Legal Initiatives for Vietnam stated that there are currently 17 independent journalists behind bars in the country, all of whom were jailed within the last five years.
While all media outlets in Vietnam undergo government censorship, some outlets are funded by private corporations, although they must receive their licenses from government ministries. Long said these semi-privatized outlets, which have been the most professionalized and provided news which has not entirely aligned with Hanoi and government policy, are being pushed out.
“The quality is going to go south very, very quickly,” he said.
Long gave the example of Zing News.
In July 2023 the news site was suspended for three months after it was investigated by the Ministry of Information and Communications. The outlet came back after the suspension but was rebranded as Z News and the quality and frequency of its content was greatly downgraded, effectively making the outlet “irrelevant,” Long said.
He said that the outlet was punished for writing articles about Russia’s war on Ukraine that created “pro-Ukraine sentiment among the Vietnamese public.”
“They published a lot of articles about the Ukraine war that fell out of the [Communist] Party’s line, which is always to be pro-Russia,” Long said.
A researcher of Vietnamese media, who asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns, told VOA that the digitizing of national media allows it to “masquerade” propaganda as news.
“I think it’s very depressing. … It’s going to be uniform news, and it’s going to be only from the government’s point of view,” the researcher said. “There’s going to be fewer and fewer people dedicated to work as journalists and seeking out the news that matters to the Vietnamese people.”
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