Radio Television Ceuta (RTVCE)

Radio Televisión Ceuta (RTVCE) is the public broadcaster of the autonomous city of Ceuta. It is a public limited company whose entire share capital belongs to the Ciudad Autónoma de Ceuta. The company was created in 2000; television began test transmissions that year and regular programming in 2001, and the radio service followed in late 2005. Gonzalo Testa has been gerente, the company’s chief executive, since July 2024.

Media assets

Television: a single digital terrestrial channel, carried in high definition since November 2020.

Radio: RTVCE’s public radio service on 99.0 FM, on air since late 2005.

Digital: rtvce.es and Ceuta Play, the company’s streaming platform and mobile application.

Ownership and governance

RTVCE’s statutes are published on its transparency portal. Article 1 constitutes it as a commercial company in the form of a sociedad anónima. Article 6 fixes the share capital at EUR 901,500, divided into 15,000 registered shares of EUR 60.10 each, and provides that the Ciudad Autónoma de Ceuta holds all of them. Article 2 sets the corporate purpose as telecommunications services, radio and television broadcasting, and the production and distribution of content.

The company has three organs. The Junta General de Accionistas decides by majority under Article 10. Because the city holds every share, the Assembly of Ceuta sits as the general meeting: RTVCE’s published record of its collegiate bodies lists the Junta General as the 25 deputies by political group, presided over by Juan Jesús Vivas Lara, and gives the composition as of 23 June 2025 as nine Popular Party deputies, four Vox, three Socialist, three Movimiento por la Dignidad y la Ciudadanía, two Ceuta Ya! and four unaffiliated. The 2023 election had returned nine Popular Party seats, six Socialist, five Vox, three Movimiento por la Dignidad y la Ciudadanía and two Ceuta Ya!.

Article 13 provides for a Consejo de Administración of seven members including the President, with a secretary who does not vote. Article 15 has the Junta General appoint the directors, Article 14 sets their term at four years, and Article 17 has the board decide by absolute majority of the directors present. The statutes prescribe no reinforced majority for the appointments. RTVCE publishes the board as Alberto Ramón Gaitán Rodríguez as chair, Alejandro Ramírez Hurtado as vice-chair, and Alfonso Conejo Rodríguez, Julio Gregorio Basurco Díaz, Fatima Hamed Hossain, Virginia Saura Cano and Sandra López Cantero. María Teresa López Álvarez resigned with effect from 20 March 2025.

Under Article 18(e) the Consejo de Administración appoints and removes the chief executive. Testa was appointed in July 2024 after José Manuel González Navarro resigned at the end of June.

Appointments to the board rest with the Junta General deciding by majority. Because the Popular Party governs the city alone in a minority administration with nine of the Assembly’s 25 seats, it does not command an absolute majority in the shareholder body, and board appointments depend on the voting behaviour of other deputies, whether in support or by abstention. The Popular Party formed that minority government in August 2023 after a coalition agreement with the Socialists was blocked by the party’s national leadership and talks with the two local parties failed over their demand for seats in government; it has governed since by seeking support case by case.

Title IV of the statutes establishes a Consejo Asesor de Redacción of nine members including its president, designated by all the political groups represented in the Assembly on proportional criteria. Its three functions are to ensure that programming complies with the principles of political pluralism, effective equality, cultural plurality and citizens’ political participation; to give an opinion on the appointment of the Director General, which to be favourable must be adopted by a two-thirds agreement of its members; and to approve, on the Director General’s proposal, the entity’s plan of activities relating to programming.

That body had lain dormant for more than ten years when it was reactivated on 30 September 2021 with five named members from the audiovisual and cultural sectors, its first session convened to approve the 2021/2022 programming schedule. RTVCE’s transparency portal publishes no composition, rules or reports for it, and no record of its activity after 2021 was located for this update, including any opinion in connection with the 2024 appointment. The portal’s sections for senior-officer pay and for professional profiles are listed but empty.

In July 2025 the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Andalucía upheld a ruling against RTVCE for breaching the principle of equality and acting arbitrarily in its recruitment, having set up a rotation system and a worker pool in March 2020 and then hired outside the list. The journalist who brought the first case was awarded about EUR 30,000 for lost earnings and moral damages, with the total across the affected workers put at more than EUR 50,000. The finding concerns employment practice rather than editorial content.

Ceuta has no audiovisual authority of its own. The only such bodies in Spain operate in Catalonia, the Valencian Community and Andalusia.

Source of funding and budget

RTVCE is funded almost entirely by the Ciudad Autónoma de Ceuta. In 2024 those transfers were 99.6% of operating income, and staff costs of EUR 2,347,121.43 were 80.2% of it. RTVCE’s budget-liquidation document for 2024 records the same accounting result as a loss of EUR 71,198.52 against total income of EUR 3,122,948.53 and total expenditure of EUR 3,194,147.05, and puts the current transfer from the city at EUR 2,918,006.06 on that budgetary basis. For 2025 the reported staff cost is EUR 2,567,063 against operating costs of EUR 3,275,126, or 78.4%, with a headcount of 39. The 2025 accounts were not on the transparency portal at this update, so the 2025 figures are as reported rather than audited.

Audites Auditoría SLP issued an unqualified opinion on the 2024 accounts on 23 April 2025, without qualification or emphasis paragraphs. The accounts record that two directors stated dissent on their formulation.

Editorial independence

Interviews conducted for State Media Monitor with local journalists in Ceuta between April and May 2024 recorded concerns that the broadcaster does not accommodate criticism of the city authorities, and a perception among staff and observers that the government shapes the editorial agenda and limits critical coverage of political decision-making.

The appointment of Gonzalo Testa in July 2024 drew criticism from Vox and from some local commentators. The Consejo de Administración nevertheless approved him with the support of the Popular Party, the Socialist Party and Ceuta Ya!, while Movimiento por la Dignidad y la Ciudadanía abstained and Vox voted against. Vox called the decision arbitrary and said it would challenge it. Local commentary attributed the appointment to political proximity to Ceuta Ya! rather than to professional credentials, and another account treated it as a tightening of political control. Those are contested characterisations rather than established findings. Ceuta Ya! is not a party of government: it holds two of the Assembly’s 25 seats, its 2023 talks with the Popular Party failed, and it voted against the city’s 2026 budget.

A content analysis conducted by the Media and Journalism Research Center in March and April 2025 found no evidence of pro-government bias in RTVCE’s coverage, and local journalists interviewed for that review did not confirm the existence of such bias.

RTVCE publishes no editorial code or style manual, and its transparency portal carries no news council, editorial statute or programme contract. The statutory Consejo Asesor de Redacción, whose composition is drawn proportionally from the Assembly’s political groups and which is empowered to approve the programming plan, is the mechanism the statutes provide for this purpose; no record of its operation after 2021 was located.

No complaint of a specific editorial intervention at RTVCE during 2025 or 2026 was located for this update. The sources checked were RTVCE’s transparency portal and published documents, the Assembly of Ceuta’s proceedings and local reporting.

AI and digital policy

No RTVCE policy on the use of artificial intelligence in journalism, and no deployment of artificial-intelligence tools by the broadcaster, was located for this update.RTVCE has reported on artificial-intelligence initiatives in the city, including a Ceuta–University of Granada chair in the field, but those are activities of other bodies.

Classification rationale

RTVCE remains classified Independent State-Funded and State-Managed (ISFM).

The city owns every share, supplies effectively all the company’s income and appoints its board. Those are the conditions of public ownership and public funding, and they are not in question.

Two features bear against a finding of editorial control by the city government. The shareholder body is the Assembly rather than the executive, and the governing Popular Party holds only nine of its 25 seats, short of an absolute majority. And the content analysis conducted in March and April 2025 found no evidence of pro-government bias, which is the basis on which the broadcaster was returned to this category after its 2024 reclassification.

The weakness is in the machinery rather than in the ownership. The Consejo Asesor de Redacción is a proportionally composed body with power over the programming plan and a formal statutory role in giving an opinion on the appointment of the Director General, and it is the principal explicit editorial safeguard the statutes provide. It was dormant for more than a decade before 2021 and there is no published record that it has met since. RTVCE publishes no editorial code, and the sections of its transparency portal covering senior pay and professional profiles are empty.

September 2026