Corporación de Servizos Audiovisuais de Galicia (CSAG)

Corporación de Servizos Audiovisuais de Galicia (CSAG) operates Galicia’s public television, radio and digital services. Its origins lie in the Compañía de Radio-Televisión de Galicia, created by a 1984 law; Radio Galega and TVG began broadcasting in 1985. The corporation subsequently operated as CRTVG, S.A. Law 1/2025, in force from 7 April 2025, provided for its change of name to CSAG while preserving corporate continuity. Its public-service mission includes promoting the Galician language and reflecting the region’s political, social and cultural pluralism. Concepción Pombo Romero is Director General.

Media assets

Television: TVG, G2, TVG Europa and TVG América

Radio: Radio Galega, Radio Galega Música, Son Galicia Radio and Radio Picariña

Digital: AGalega.gal, AGalega Audio, Xabarín, the G24.gal news portal and G24Play

Ownership and governance

CSAG is a public limited company whose share capital is held entirely and directly by the Autonomous Community of Galicia. The 2025 law grants it management autonomy and functional independence from the Xunta.

Its Board of Directors has seven statutory seats, including the Director General. Parliament elects the other six members by a two-thirds majority, or by three-fifths on a subsequent ballot. Their terms last five years and may be renewed once. The Board approves the corporation’s editorial guiding criteria. The law prohibits Board members and the Director General from accepting instructions from the Xunta, political parties or other outside bodies.

Parliament elects the Director General by two-thirds, or by three-fifths on a second ballot. If the second threshold is not met, a further parliamentary sitting may elect the candidate by absolute majority; the Board then makes the formal appointment. Pombo was elected on 8 July 2025 at that third stage, with votes from the governing Partido Popular alone. She had headed the broadcaster’s Information and Documentation area since 2017 and succeeded Alfonso Sánchez Izquierdo, who had led its predecessor since 2009.

Renewal of the other Board seats was still pending in September 2026, with one seat vacant. The 2025 law also provides for a 15-member Social and Professional Participation Advisory Council, including two representatives of CSAG staff, with a remit covering pluralism and the independence of content. Parliamentary scrutiny and financial oversight by Galicia’s Council of Accounts are established separately.

Source of funding and budget

CSAG receives most of its financing from Galicia’s public budget and also earns advertising and other operating income. Its 2025 budget was approximately EUR 135.7 million. The 2026 consolidated budget is EUR 139,993,942.

The two public contributions represent approximately 93.9 per cent of planned financing. Within the 2026 total, EUR 12.3 million is a provision associated with a VAT dispute, rather than money allocated to ordinary investment or spending.

CSAG publishes annual accounts and audit reports. Its accounts for 2025 recorded a positive budgetary result of EUR 687,166.

Editorial independence

Law 1/2025 requires news services to be produced by information professionals under standards intended to protect quality and independence. CSAG also publishes editorial guiding criteria, adopted in 2018 and amended in 2024, requiring pluralism and a clear separation of information from opinion. The former 2011 law envisaged a professional News Council to defend the independence of news content; that requirement does not appear in the 2025 law, which instead provides for the broader advisory council described above.

The staff movement Defende A Galega has protested against alleged political interference through its weekly Venres Negros actions since 2018. An indefinite series of stoppages began in October 2024 after the in-house programme A Revista was replaced by the externally coproduced O Termómetro. Staff representatives argued that outsourcing shifted influence over the programme’s treatment of public affairs; management defended coproduction and rejected the suggestion that it would eliminate jobs. The often-cited 32.5 per cent strike participation was management’s estimate for the first day, not a measure of the strike as a whole.

Two labour rulings establish breaches of staff rights, with different legal findings. In June 2025, a Social Court held that changing a striking worker’s shift violated the right to strike. In March 2026, Galicia’s High Court held that the 2023 involuntary reassignment of a journalist active in Defende A Galega and in employment litigation breached the constitutional guarantee against retaliation for pursuing legal claims; it awarded EUR 7,501. Neither judgment determined that Xunta officials had directed the content of a particular news report. A separate criminal harassment complaint involving Sánchez Izquierdo and others was provisionally dismissed in 2025, and that dismissal was upheld on appeal.

External electoral oversight has also intervened. During the 2024 Galician election, the electoral authorities required CRTVG to increase the time reserved in its news bulletins for campaign coverage from the proposed four minutes and twenty seconds to at least the six minutes used at the previous election. The Central Electoral Board upheld that decision, and the Supreme Court dismissed the broadcaster’s appeal in April 2025. The ruling concerned the amount of campaign coverage; it did not establish systematic partisan bias in the tone of reporting.

The editorial dispute continued under Pombo. In September 2026, staff representatives objected to presenter-delivered opinion segments in TVG and Radio Galega news programming, alleging that they repeated Partido Popular arguments and conflicted with CSAG’s published separation of information and opinion. Management had stated in February that editorial decisions belonged to news professionals working without outside interference. In its response to a further staff statement on 29 September, it defended its staffing and production arrangements. The partisan character and editorial authorship of the disputed segments have not been established by an independent ruling cited here.

AI and digital policy

CSAG’s 2026 financial plan describes proposed uses of AI for transcription, cataloguing, content retrieval and audience analysis. It specifies human supervision for pilot projects and says these projects are intended not to interfere with creative or editorial processes. CSAG’s 2025 public-service report records work on automatic subtitling and recommendation systems. In 2026, its AGalega platform also launched Resetéame, a cultural programme using AI to recreate historical figures.

Classification rationale

CSAG remains classified State-Controlled (SC). It is wholly publicly owned and predominantly publicly financed. The 2025 appointment rule enabled the governing party to elect the Director General without opposition support, although the law formally protects the independence of management and provides for parliamentary and advisory oversight.

The editorial assessment rests on the longstanding, specific objections raised by news staff, their renewed allegations concerning named programmes in September 2026, and the judgment finding retaliation against a journalist active in the independence protests. The electoral authorities’ intervention provides a separate, narrower finding concerning campaign airtime. The court and electoral decisions do not themselves establish that the Xunta imposed CSAG’s editorial line.

September 2026