“We have to be the actors” – RTV SLO President calls for greater reform

IN BRIEF: 

• The Slovenian government has approved a 10 percent increase in the RTV Contribution, meaning households will now pay €14.02 every month.
• RTV SLO’s new President warned that while the funding boost was welcomed, it would not solve the challenges facing the organisation.
• The public broadcasters’ management team are calling on greater legislative reform to allow them to adapt to the digital age.

IN FULL: 

The new Board President of RTV Slovenija (RTV SLO) has called for greater reform to allow the broadcaster modernise to the digital age.  

At the end of August, Slovenia’s government approved a 10 percent increase in the monthly licence fee. From 1 January, the RTV Contribution will rise to €14.02 per month. All households which own a device which can receive either television or radio programmes are legally obliged to pay the contribution.  

The licence fee has been frozen for the past 12 years, a period where “everything has,” said Deputy Prime Minister Matej Archon. According to the Broadcasting Act, the licence fee should increase by the rate of inflation annually, although exceptions are allowed during times of economic hardship.  

Read more: Trust at RTV SLO: “It is easier to ruin than rebuild”

But whether the increase will be able to strengthen RTV SLO after a period of funding insecurity and political interference, remains to be seen. “This difference basically means some extra money,” said the newly-appointed RTV SLO Board President, Natalija Gorščak. “This money alone will not solve our problems because it is really a minimal increase.”  

Funding increase guaranteed

Under Slovenia’s former government, RTV SLO faced a variety of threats, including changes to programming and the executive management. When the government was voted out in 2022, the new government, led by Prime Minister Robert Golob, promised to install greater safeguards against political interference and undue influence.  

The resulting public media law came into effect in June 2023. Since then, the broadcaster has been focussed on restoring trust following years of politicisation.  

The Culture Minister, Asta Vrečko, said the broadcaster has been a “priority” for the government. “The new law removed politics from leadership and management. This was a necessary step; politics has been interfering for too long and has had consequences.” A funding increase remains another part of what is required to provide more stability to RTV SLO, Vrečko said.

In an official statement, RTV SLO recognised that this was the first government in more than a [decade?] “to listen to RTV Slovenia, to recognise the financial challenges that RTV Slovenia is facing, and to respond concretely to them.”  

Despite the legislative changes, funding remained a gaping problem for the broadcaster. But this increase would “certainly contribute to the improvement of the financial situation,” the organisation said.  

But the challenge of adapting a legacy media company to the demands and requirements of audiences in the digital age would not be solved by this funding increase, Gorščak warned. 

“We are not concerned with how to enter the 21st century, because this house, in my opinion, stood in the last century. We have not gone through digitisation to the right extent or through integration, we are lagging behind with formats, we are lagging behind with the method of distributing our content. After all, we don’t know how to find viewers on other platforms.”  

Next step for RTV SLO

Neither the broadcaster nor the government have pretended the increase in the RTV Contribution is enough to fix the organisation’s finances. Both sides have recognised organisational changes will be necessary, with some reforms already touted, which include integrating several different departments. “All of Europe has already moved in the direction of integration”, Gorščak told MMC RTV SLO.  

But more legislative changes will also be necessary, she said, to allow RTV SLO to modernise sufficiently. “It seems to me that basically we are the ones who need to be a little more active,” she said. “We are all too passive and all too few are the ones who would suggest something, who would like to change something, and we just wait for something to fall from the sky. We are the ones who have to be the actors.” 

During a meeting between the government and RTV SLO executives, both sides agreed on the need for updating the legislative requirements of the broadcaster.  

“We have not gone through digitisation to the right extent or through integration, we are lagging behind with formats, we are lagging behind with the method of distributing our content. After all, we don’t know how to find viewers on other platforms.” – RTV SLO Board President, Natalija Gorščak

Signs of hope for the region

Proposals to give public media more funding signals a long-overdue moment of positivity for central and eastern Europe, after a challenging decade marked by populist leaders attempting to infiltrate, undermine, or censor public broadcasters.  

Such efforts have been most drastic in Hungary, where there has been political interference in the national broadcaster, and ownership of private media taken up by key allies of the president – dubbed the ‘Orbanisation’ of the media – has led to widespread censorship. Similar efforts were made in Slovenia and the Czech Republic, although changes in government arrested their efforts. But a recent law in Slovakia has provoked significant consternation over how it might impact the independence of RTVS, now named STVR.  

RTV SLO’s funding increase, given the perilous position it was in just two years ago, represents opportunity and hope for other public media on the brink. Similarly, in Poland, reforms pushed through by President Donald Tusk seem to be restoring independence back to TVP, giving it greater independence to focus on news, rather than propaganda.  

In the Czech Republic, meanwhile, there was a proposal to increase the household fees for both Czech Television and Czech Radio, by 10 crowns and 5 crowns respectively. The bill passed its first reading in the Chamber of Deputies in July.

ANALYSIS:

Challenges still remain for public media in Slovenia, particularly while funding for RTV SLO remains insufficient. But for the government to recognise the need for an independent and well-resourced is significant, given where RTV SLO found itself just two years ago. Reforms and organisational changes will be necessary, as they are in many public media organisations which are having to rapidly adapt to the digital age, and ensure they continue to be valued and accessible for all audiences.