Établissement de la radio tunisienne (Radio Tunisienne)

Radio Tunisienne, officially the Établissement de la Radio Tunisienne (ERT), is Tunisia’s national public radio broadcaster. It operates national radio services alongside a network of regional and local stations carrying news, cultural programming and local content. Its public-radio perimeter also includes the confiscated religious station Radio Zitouna, attached to Radio Tunisienne since 2021, although the legal basis of that transfer has been contested. In late 2023 the government decided to integrate the staff of Shems FM, a station confiscated after the 2011 revolution from interests linked to the family of former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, into Radio Tunisienne. The personnel integration began in January 2024 and expanded the state broadcaster’s staffing burden, while Shems FM’s institutional and legal status remained subject to separate judicial procedures.

Media assets

National: Radio Nationale / Radio Tunis, RTCI (Radio Tunis Chaîne Internationale), Radio Jeunes, Radio Tunisie Culture, and Radio Zitouna.

Regional and local: Radio Sfax, Radio Monastir, Radio Le Kef, Radio Gafsa, Radio Tataouine, Radio Kasserine, and Radio Panorama.

Ownership and governance

Radio Tunisienne was created through the structural reform that split the former unified Établissement de la radiodiffusion-télévision tunisienne (ERTT) into separate radio and television institutions. The separation was decided under the Ben Ali regime and given legal form in 2007, notably through Law No. 2007-33 on public audiovisual institutions and Decree No. 2007-1867 of 23 July 2007, which created and organised the Établissement de la Radio Tunisienne. The successor radio and television institutions became operational later that year. Like Télévision Tunisienne, Radio Tunisienne is a public institution wholly owned by the Tunisian state and governed within the executive branch’s institutional framework.

The appointment of the broadcaster’s President Director General is formally subject to the broadcast regulator HAICA’s binding opinion, under the framework created by Decree-Law No. 2011-116. In practice, this check has been hollowed out. HAICA has been left without a fully functioning leadership structure since 2023, with no effective renewal of its governing body, and government measures including the freezing of certain members’ salaries have further impeded its ability to operate.

Henda Ben Alaya Ghribi was appointed President Director General of Radio Tunisienne by Decree No. 2023-434 of 2 June 2023, succeeding Sofiane Ben Aïssa, whose mandate was ended by decree the same day. She had previously held leadership roles within the public broadcasting sector, including in national programming. Her appointment was publicly criticised by HAICA and media organisations as bypassing the regulator’s consultative role, consistent with the wider erosion of independent oversight. She remained in post as of mid-2026, including as Radio Tunisienne’s representative at the European Broadcasting Union General Assembly in Prague in June 2026.

Leadership at the broadcaster has changed repeatedly through executive decree and intervention since President Kais Saied assumed exceptional powers in 2021. Saied directly ended the mandate of interim head Chokri Cheniti in February 2022, and subsequent changes have occurred without an effective regulatory check. This pattern of executive appointment and removal is central to the broadcaster’s State-Controlled classification.

Source of funding and budget

Radio Tunisienne is financed primarily through public and state-controlled resources. It receives state support and may generate advertising and other commercial revenue, but commercial income does not provide an independent financial base. As with other Tunisian public media, a household broadcasting fee is collected through electricity bills, but the proceeds are allocated through state-controlled public-finance mechanisms rather than creating a direct, independently controlled funding stream for the broadcaster. The integration of Shems FM personnel added to Radio Tunisienne’s wage burden in a sector already widely described as overstaffed, reinforcing its dependence on state financing.

Editorial independence

Radio Tunisienne historically functioned as a government-controlled outlet that echoed official narratives. In the decade after the 2011 revolution, efforts were made to turn it into a more pluralistic and independent institution, and the broadcaster adopted an editorial charter intended to uphold professional integrity and journalistic independence.

That progress has largely been reversed since President Kais Saied invoked his exceptional measures in 2021. As with Tunisia’s wider public broadcasting sector, Radio Tunisienne has fallen back under direct executive control. Leadership changes have bypassed the effective operation of HAICA’s appointment-review role, while the broadcaster’s formal editorial commitments no longer provide meaningful insulation from political pressure. Saied has publicly called on public media to enlist in what he terms a “national liberation war,” placing public broadcasters within a broader state-messaging framework. The wider legal environment compounds the pressure: Decree-Law No. 2022-54 on cyber-offences, used to prosecute journalists and commentators for “false news,” continued to generate prosecutions and custodial sentences through 2026.

No functioning independent mechanism currently assesses or protects Radio Tunisienne’s editorial autonomy from executive direction. The combination of state ownership, executive appointment power, regulatory paralysis and political pressure has signalled a return toward its pre-revolutionary role as a vehicle for state messaging.

AI and digital policy

SMM found no evidence that Radio Tunisienne had published a dedicated public AI governance or editorial-use policy as of mid-2026. The broadcaster maintains online and social distribution of its channels and has engaged with digital and AI-related themes at the sector level, but it has not disclosed a framework governing the use of AI in editorial production, verification, attribution, recommendation systems, audience analytics, synthetic-media labelling, content disclosure, bias mitigation or human editorial oversight.

Classification rationale

Radio Tunisienne is classified as State-Controlled (SC), a classification maintained from prior SMM cycles and unchanged for 2026. The broadcaster is fully state-owned, dependent on public and state-controlled financing, and governed through executive appointments and removals, with the regulatory check that nominally applies to those appointments no longer functioning effectively. Its editorial output operates in an environment of direct executive pressure, its formal post-2011 editorial safeguards no longer provide effective protection, and no independent oversight mechanism protects its autonomy. All three State Media Matrix determinants, ownership, funding and editorial control, point to the state, and the erosion of HAICA’s oversight during the cycle has deepened rather than diluted that control.

June 2026