Établissement de la télévision tunisienne (ETT)

Télévision Tunisienne, officially the Établissement de la Télévision Tunisienne (ETT), is Tunisia’s public television broadcaster. It operates the national channels Al Wataniya 1 and Al Wataniya 2, which carry news, cultural and public-interest programming to audiences across the country. In 2026, the broadcaster marked the sixtieth anniversary of public television in Tunisia and expanded its national audiovisual offering with Watania Sports, a public sports channel whose experimental broadcasting began on 29 March 2026.

Media assets

Television: Al Wataniya 1, Al Wataniya 2, Watania Sports

Ownership and governance

ETT emerged from the restructuring of Tunisia’s former unified state broadcasting institution, the Établissement de la radiodiffusion-télévision tunisienne (ERTT). The separation of radio and television was initiated under the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and ETT was legally established and organised by Decree No. 2007-1868 of 23 July 2007, which created a separate public television institution alongside the Établissement de la Radio Tunisienne (ERT). The broadcaster is fully state-owned and operates within the executive branch’s institutional framework.

Tunisia’s broadcast regulator, the Haute Autorité indépendante de la communication audiovisuelle (HAICA), created by Decree-Law No. 2011-116, was given the legal prerogative to issue a binding opinion on the appointment of the heads of public audiovisual institutions. 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. A draft law to reform the broadcasting sector has remained under parliamentary review, leaving the regulatory framework in prolonged uncertainty.

Leadership has changed repeatedly under direct executive control. President Kais Saied dismissed ETT’s chief executive Mohamed Lassaad Dahech in July 2021, in one of his first moves after assuming full executive powers, and placed Awatef Dali in charge on an interim basis. Dali was formally appointed in June 2023, but was dismissed in September 2024. On 19 September 2024, Saied appointed Chokri Ben Nessir, previously head of the state printing and publishing company SNIPE-La Presse, as ETT’s President Director General by presidential decree. Ben Nessir remained in post as of mid-2026, including during the COPEAM audiovisual conference hosted in Tunis in May 2026. The pattern of direct executive appointment and removal, without a functioning regulatory check, is central to the broadcaster’s State-Controlled classification.

Source of funding and budget

ETT depends primarily on public and state-controlled financing. It receives state support and may generate advertising and other commercial revenue, but commercial income does not provide an independent financial base. Tunisia also levies a public broadcasting fee on households, collected through electricity bills, but the proceeds are routed through state finances rather than creating a direct, independently controlled funding stream for the broadcaster. ETT therefore depends on the state both for its core funding and for the allocation of public resources, reinforcing its financial dependence on the executive.

Editorial independence

Tunisia’s state television has historically functioned as an instrument of government communication, with editorial direction shaped through executive appointments. The 2019 contrat d’objectifs et de moyens between the government and ETT was presented as a safeguard, conditioning the dismissal of the PDG on a formal HAICA evaluation and offering a potential mechanism to insulate the broadcaster from political pressure. That protection proved short-lived: Saied’s July 2021 dismissal of Dahech bypassed the contract’s procedures, and with HAICA weakened since 2023 the mechanism is no longer operative.

Editorial control has tightened under Saied’s exceptional measures. The broadcaster has been reported to exclude political party representatives from its programming, and public channels have become increasingly closed to dissenting political voices. Saied has also publicly summoned and reprimanded ETT executives over editorial output, calling on public media to enlist in what he terms a “national liberation war.” 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 statutory safeguard or functioning independent oversight currently protects ETT’s editorial autonomy from executive direction.

AI and digital policy

SMM found no evidence that ETT had published a dedicated public AI governance or editorial-use policy as of mid-2026. The broadcaster has engaged with digital and AI themes at the sector level, including through the 2026 COPEAM conference in Tunis, which addressed the future of audiovisual media in the digital and AI era, and it maintains online and social distribution of its channels. It has not, however, 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

ETT 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. The regulatory check that nominally applied to leadership appointments is no longer functioning effectively, while editorial output is subject to direct executive pressure and opposition voices have been restricted from public television. 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