Bulgarian National Radio (BNR)

Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) is Bulgaria’s national public radio broadcaster. Tsar Boris III signed the decree establishing it on 25 January 1935, which made radio broadcasting in Bulgaria state property. BNR operates two national programmes, Horizont and Hristo Botev, nine regional stations and the international service Radio Bulgaria, and has been a full member of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) since 1993. Milen Mitev has been its Director General since October 2021.

Media assets

Radio: National – Horizont, Hristo Botev; Regional – Radio Blagoevgrad, Radio Burgas, Radio Kardzhali, Radio Plovdiv, Radio Shumen, Radio Sofia, Radio Stara Zagora, Radio Varna, Radio Vidin; International – Radio Bulgaria, an online multilingual news service with 11 language services, whose shortwave broadcasts ended on 1 February 2012.

Digital: bnrnews.bg, the renewed news portal launched on 28 November 2025, with content in Bulgarian and ten other languages from Radio Bulgaria; bnr.bg, the institutional portal; binar.bg, an audio and video platform for young audiences; detskotobnr.bg, a children’s portal; archives.bnr.bg, the archive of BNR’s Golden Fund; and a mobile application launched in December 2025 that combines live radio, news, music and a platform for children.

Ownership and governance

The Radio and Television Act of 1998 defines BNR and Bulgarian National Television (BNT) as national public-service providers and as legal persons with head offices in Sofia. BNR is governed by a Management Board and a Director General. The Board has five members: the Director General, who chairs it, and four members nominated by the Director General and endorsed by the Council for Electronic Media (CEM) by a two-thirds majority. The CEM elects the Director General by a majority of all its members for a three-year term, renewable once in succession. Three of the CEM’s five members are elected by the National Assembly and two are appointed by the President.

Mitev joined BNR in 2009 as a legal adviser and returned on 1 April 2020 as director of its Administrative Directorate, after working at the Bulgarian News Agency. After Director General Andon Baltakov resigned, the CEM appointed Mitev interim Director General at an extraordinary session on 4 August 2021, and elected him on 27 October 2021 with four of its five votes. On 17 October 2024 the CEM re-elected him for a second three-year term with the votes of Gabriela Naplatanova, Galina Georgieva and Kadrinka Kadrinova, while Prolet Velkova and Simona Veleva voted against.

On 28 July 2025 the CEM approved a new Management Board comprising Anna Hadzhieva, Daniel Spasov, Dimitar Abrashev and Sofia Vladimirova. The European Commission’s 2026 rule of law chapter on Bulgaria states that no laws have yet been adopted to improve the independence of public service media, with provisions expected in a draft law amending the Radio and Television Act.

Source of funding and budget

BNR is financed mainly by a state subsidy for the preparation, creation and distribution of national and regional programmes, calculated per hour of programming on the basis of a norm approved by the Council of Ministers, and by a grant for tangible fixed assets. The Radio and Television Fund provided for by law, which was to be financed by a fee, never started operating and remained only on paper.

BNR’s budget was BGN 62,974,400 in 2024 and BGN 66,132,500 in 2025, including BGN 3.9 million under the Radio and Television Act. After an extension law at the start of the year, the 2026 State Budget Act allocated BNR EUR 35.3 million, including EUR 2.0 million as a grant for tangible fixed assets, on the basis of a norm of EUR 331.80 per programme hour. BNR’s 2026 budget plans expenditure of EUR 37.1 million and EUR 1.0 million in own revenue, and provides for 1,235 staff positions.

Presenting BNR’s position to the parliamentary culture and media committee in July 2026, Mitev said that the average gross salary at BNR was EUR 1,227, and BTA reported that over the past 15 years the subsidy had grown by 29 per cent while inflation had reached 68 per cent. On 25 September 2026 BNR announced that the Ministry of Finance had agreed an additional targeted transfer, of an undisclosed amount, to raise the salaries of the musicians in BNR’s ensembles from 1 October 2026, after the ensembles had stopped performing in March. An Audit Office compliance audit of 2017 to September 2019, published in 2023, found that BGN 1,061,142 of the grant for fixed assets had been spent for purposes other than intended.

Editorial independence

On 13 September 2019, the day after the host Silvia Velikova was removed from her programme, BNR interrupted the terrestrial broadcasting of Horizont from its 64 transmitting stations across the country, while Hristo Botev continued broadcasting. BNR’s chief editor said that the Director General, Svetoslav Kostov, had received pressure from a very high level to take Velikova off the air, while the management blamed a technical incident. The Communications Regulation Commission found that there were no statutory grounds giving BNR the right to interrupt broadcasting and that BNR had provided no evidence of a technical problem. Velikova was reinstated, and on 17 October 2019 the CEM terminated Kostov’s mandate, citing Velikova’s unlawful removal and his unconvincing and contradictory explanations as aggravating circumstances. A media capture monitoring report published in December 2024 found that, given the challenges to the CEM’s credibility, the autonomy of BNT and BNR was further eroded.

At the end of 2023 BNR, on the recommendation of its Programme Council, decided not to broadcast an interview with the Russian ambassador, and on 7 March 2024 the Management Board closed the Programme Directorate; Mitev said the decision did not affect the radio’s freedom. On 15 January 2026 the Management Board adopted, with effect from 1 February 2026, regulations on BNR’s editorial activity, internal rules for creating and managing its content in a digital environment, and regulations on the work of its unified newsroom and the organisation of news. At a CEM discussion in July 2026, Mitev said that all important decisions are taken by collective bodies, that BNR has an editorial charter agreed between the management and representatives of the programmes’ editorial boards, which journalists establish to protect their interests, and that disputes between journalists and their superiors are resolved by the Programme Council. BNR’s media ombudsman is tasked with defending the interests of the audience, including in cases concerning objectivity, transparency, pluralism and the right of reply.

In monitoring the campaign for the early parliamentary election of 19 April 2026, the CEM found that, as parliament continued to sit, live broadcasts of its sittings on Horizont and BNT 1 became platforms for political campaigning outside the editorial control of the public broadcasters. On 13 August 2026 Deputy Prime Minister Ivo Hristov said in an interview on BNT that BNT upheld some principles, but that it was hard for him to say the same about BNR. The CEM found it unacceptable for high-ranking representatives of the executive to pit the two public media against each other, noting that BNR ranked first in public trust in the latest Reuters Institute report; AEJ-Bulgaria described Hristov’s remarks as an attempt at influence. In September Hristov said in an exchange in parliament that BNR did not meet the criteria of objectivity. AEJ-Bulgaria also stated that the participation of Management Board member Daniel Spasov in the initiative committee nominating a presidential ticket posed a serious reputational problem for the radio.

AI and digital policy

According to a member of its Digital Programmes Directorate, the main artificial intelligence tools used on BNR’s website convert text into sound and sound into video and process images and videos. BNR introduced an artificial intelligence voice to read news on its website, and since December 2024 more than 80 per cent of its published materials have this function. Since April 2025 its news has also been read by an AI avatar trained in Bulgarian. In February 2026 Mitev said that media should be fully transparent about how and why they use artificial intelligence. No separately published comprehensive BNR editorial policy governing generative artificial intelligence was identified for this update.

Classification rationale

BNR was classified State-Controlled (SC) from 2022 to 2025 and is reclassified as Independent State Funded and State Managed (ISFM) in 2026. Its financing and governance are unchanged: BNR depends predominantly on state budget financing, and its leadership is appointed by the Council for Electronic Media, whose members are elected by the National Assembly or appointed by the President. These conditions make BNR state funded and state managed, but the typology reserves the SC category for media that follow an editorial line imposed or approved by state authorities. The reclassification reflects the finding that sustained government direction of BNR’s editorial coverage was not established for this review. BNR’s editorial charter, editorial boards, Programme Council and media ombudsman provide safeguards for journalistic independence, and in August 2026 the CEM publicly objected to the Deputy Prime Minister’s criticism of BNR. The 2019 interference ended with the CEM terminating the Director General’s mandate. Historical interference and continuing political pressure, including a Management Board member’s participation in a presidential nominating committee, remain concerns.

October 2026