Radiotelevision de la Region de Murcia (RTRM)

Radiotelevisión de la Región de Murcia (RTRM) is the public broadcaster of the Region of Murcia. Law 9/2004 of 29 December created it as a public business entity of the Autonomous Community with its own legal personality. It runs the region’s public radio directly, while Article 14.2 requires the regional public television service to be managed indirectly by a contracted operator, with RTRM responsible for ensuring that the content meets public-service obligations. Juan Antonio de Heras y Tudela has been Director General since March 2024.

Media assets

Television: La 7, the regional channel, produced and broadcast under contract by Central Broadcaster Media, a Grupo Secuoya company. RTRM marked the twentieth anniversary of regional television in 2026.

Radio: Onda Regional de Murcia and OR Música, both on air since 6 December 1990. RTRM launched Onda Regional Accesible on 15 April 2026 as a test broadcast on digital terrestrial channel 29, carrying live subtitles and dynamic on-screen data for deaf and hard-of-hearing listeners.

Ownership and governance

Article 3 of the founding law defines RTRM as a public business entity with its own legal personality. The law has been amended three times: by Law 10/2012 of 5 December, Law 15/2015 of 29 October and Law 4/2024 of 21 November.

Article 5.1, as amended in 2024, provides for a Board of Directors of 11 members elected for each legislature by the Asamblea Regional in proportion to parliamentary representation, from among persons of recognised standing, with a composition that must reflect the political and social pluralism of the Region. The amendment raised the number from nine. It was published in the Boletín Oficial de la Región de Murcia on 29 November 2024 and entered into force the same day, with a transitional provision keeping the nine sitting members in post and requiring two more to be elected within one month.

The Board reached its statutory eleven-member composition on 27 November 2025, almost a year after that deadline, when Carlos Fernández de la Cruz Fernández Montesinos and José Sordo García took office in the two newly created seats. Nazarena Balaguer González took office at the same time, replacing José Luis Domínguez Fernández following his resignation. The eleven members are María Robles Mateo, María Dolores Alegría López, Ángel López Naranjo, María del Carmen Ayala Lova, Piedad Alarcón García, Encarnación Toledo Jiménez, Juan Ignacio Cortés Guardiola, Paloma Ayensa López de Ceballos, Carlos Fernández de la Cruz Fernández Montesinos, José Sordo García and Nazarena Balaguer González.

Law 9/2004 also charges the Board with fixing every six months the share of airtime allocated to significant political and social groups, and makes membership incompatible with media and advertising interests, political office and senior leadership functions in political parties, trade unions and employers’ organisations.

Under Article 11 the Asamblea Regional designates the Director General by a two-thirds majority in the first vote or by absolute majority in a second vote, and the mandate runs for the same period as the legislature. Law 15/2015 moved the appointment from the regional government to the Assembly, set the second vote within seven days and required the process to conclude within two months of each legislative term. The Board may request the Director General’s removal by a two-thirds majority, and the Assembly may revoke the appointment by absolute majority.

De Heras was elected on 13 March 2024 by 30 votes to 15, with the votes of the Popular Party and Vox, and the Consejo de Gobierno confirmed the appointment on 21 March 2024. Those two parties hold 21 and 9 of the Assembly’s 45 seats, so their 30 votes meet the two-thirds threshold exactly, and the reinforced majority was reached without support from any other group. The Socialist Party opposed the selection and argued that the post should be filled by agreement across the parliamentary spectrum. De Heras, who holds degrees in information sciences and law, was a regional government councillor under earlier Popular Party administrations. He succeeded Mariano Caballero, Director General from 2019, who had been elected president of the Federation of Autonomous Radio and Television Organizations in 2023.

Articles 15 and 16 provide for a nine-year mandato marco approved by the Asamblea Regional by a two-thirds majority, and for programme contracts of at least three years approved by the Consejo de Gobierno. Article 10, which established an advisory council, has been repealed, and the founding law provides for no news council.

The Region of Murcia has no regional audiovisual authority; the only such bodies in Spain operate in Catalonia, the Valencian Community and Andalusia.

Source of funding and budget

Public money reaches the two services by separate routes. RTRM’s own budget covers the radio service and its supervision of the television contract. The payments to the television operator are made by the regional administration under the management contract and do not pass through RTRM’s accounts.

The 2025 appropriation is 0.07% of the regional consolidated budget of EUR 7,941,667,980. No budget law was passed for 2026: the Region ordered the rollover of the 2025 budget on 29 December 2025 after the governing Popular Party and Vox did not agree new accounts, and the 2025 law had itself been approved only in July of that year.

The 2020 specification set a tender base of EUR 77,500,000.06 including VAT and an estimated contract value of EUR 64,049,586.81 over five years. The procedure was launched in June 2020, suspended in July after Audiovisuales Tcero challenged the weighting given to a pay-improvement criterion, and reopened on 10 November 2020 once the central contract appeals tribunal annulled that criterion. Five bidders competed. The contract was awarded in January 2022 to Central Broadcaster Media, which scored 78.76 points against 67.42 for the runner-up.

The regional government authorised a new contract on 16 July 2026 worth EUR 99,639,168 over five years, with the service scheduled to begin on 21 April 2027 and run to 2032. The contract is being procured through an open procedure; bidding closed on 29 September 2026 and the tender remained under evaluation at this update. The annual amount is about EUR 19.9 million, some EUR 34 million above the contract it replaces across the full term.

Editorial independence

The second programme contract, signed on 31 January 2020 for 2020 to 2022, requires objective, truthful, rigorous, impartial and plural information, and states that editorial policy must respect professional independence and political pluralism. It provides for a style manual drawn up by RTRM with the operator’s input. It sets a television minimum of 60 weekly hours of public-service content including four hours of news on weekdays, 8,760 annual hours of radio, 90% subtitling, ten weekly hours of audio description and sign language, and a 2.5% audience-share target, monitored by a follow-up commission meeting at least twice a year. Its first-year contribution was EUR 5,035,936, drawn from a carried-over budget.

No successor programme contract has been published on the regional transparency portal since the 2020 to 2022 contract expired; the portal lists that contract and annual accounts through 2023. Law 9/2004 requires programme contracts of at least three years and provides for successive contracts to be approved before the preceding one expires. RTRM’s Board has continued to approve annual monitoring reports, most recently for 2024.

Operational editorial and legal responsibility for the television service rests primarily with the contracted operator, while RTRM retains statutory responsibility for ensuring compliance with the public-service obligations. The specification for indirect management assigns the concessionaire editorial and legal responsibility for discharging the public-television obligations, and RTRM exercises compliance supervision through the head of its public audiovisual service control department, working with the contract manager against the obligations set in the mandato marco. Penalties are provided for very serious defects in news quality and pluralism and in the defence of constitutional values.

A 2021 study of the model by Eduardo Fco. Rodríguez Gómez at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid found that the technical specifications left the editorial line with the contractor and limited RTRM’s capacity to monitor it, and quoted the head of the control department describing RTRM as a partial control body whose remit did not extend to editorial lines or programming-quality studies. The study recorded that the channel had no citizens’ council or formal mechanism for audience participation in decision-making, unlike most Spanish regional public broadcasters, and that Board minutes had registered complaints of tendentious bias, reduced public-service content hours and treatment far from the impartiality required of publicly funded media. It reported 66 staff and an annual budget of EUR 16 million.

No documented complaint alleging direct political interference in RTRM’s news output during 2024 to 2026 was located for this review. The sources checked were the regional transparency portal, the Asamblea Regional’s published proceedings, RTRM’s own published documents and regional reporting.

AI and digital policy

Onda Regional Accesible, launched on 15 April 2026 on digital terrestrial channel 29 with coverage above 99% of the regional population, carries live subtitles and dynamic graphics for deaf and hard-of-hearing listeners, and is described as the first test broadcast of its kind by a Spanish regional radio station. The published account does not state whether the subtitles are produced by automatic speech recognition and does not describe any human review.

The regional government has been preparing an artificial-intelligence strategy since 2025 and reported in September 2026 that it had automated 94 administrative procedures, which it said frees more than 80,000 working hours a year. Those accounts concern the regional administration and do not refer to RTRM or to the television operator.

No RTRM editorial policy for artificial intelligence in journalism was located. The sources checked were the regional transparency portal’s RTRM holdings, the programme contract and its monitoring reports, the specification for the indirect management of the television service, regional government announcements and regional reporting.

Classification rationale

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

The Region owns the company, supplies its funding and funds the television service directly through the management contract. The Asamblea Regional elects the Board in proportion to parliamentary representation and designates the Director General by a two-thirds majority or, on a second vote, by absolute majority.

The March 2024 appointment shows the limit of that reinforced majority in this assembly. The Popular Party and Vox together hold exactly 30 of the 45 seats, so they reached the two-thirds threshold on their own votes, and the governing coalition did not need the agreement of any other group. This is a structural vulnerability in the appointment system rather than evidence about output.

No evidence of a sustained editorial line imposed or approved by state authorities was found for this update, which is the editorial criterion for State-Controlled status. The distinguishing feature of this broadcaster is that the editorial responsibility for its television service sits with a private contractor by design, under a statute that requires indirect management. That arrangement places day-to-day editorial decision-making with a private operator, while RTRM and the regional administration retain supervisory, contractual and funding roles.

September 2026