Bulgarian National Television (BNT)

Bulgarian National Television (BNT) is Bulgaria’s national public provider of audiovisual media services. Television in Bulgaria was officially opened on 26 December 1959, and the broadcaster has been called Bulgarian National Television since 1992. BNT operates four channels and four regional centres, and is a member of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). Milena Milotinova has been its Director General since February 2026. BNT will be the host broadcaster of the Eurovision Song Contest in Burgas in May 2027.

Media assets

Television: BNT 1, a multi-thematic national channel; BNT 2, which links the regional centres in Plovdiv, Varna, Ruse and Blagoevgrad in a national network; BNT 3, a sports channel; and BNT 4, intended mainly for Bulgarians living abroad.

Digital: the bnt.bg portal with live streaming of its channels, and the bntnews.bg news site and BNT NEWS mobile application.

Ownership and governance

The Radio and Television Act of 1998 defines BNT and Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) as national public-service providers and as legal persons with head offices in Sofia. BNT 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 CEM by a two-thirds majority, for three-year terms. The CEM elects and dismisses the Director General by a majority of all its members, for a three-year term, renewable once in succession; a Director General continues to exercise the post’s powers until a successor takes office.

The CEM has five members: three elected by the National Assembly and two appointed by the President, for six-year terms. Gabriela Naplatanova, a presidential appointee, was elected its chair for one year from 28 April 2026.

Emil Koshlukov, acting Director General from April 2019, was elected by the CEM on 5 July 2019 by 3 votes to 2. His term expired in 2022, and he remained in office in an acting capacity after the CEM failed to elect a successor in June 2022 and again on 15 July 2025, when none of the eight candidates received the required three votes. The new procedure was suspended by the Administrative Court of Sofia Region, as the CEM announced on 1 October 2025, and halted again by the same court in January 2026, until the Supreme Administrative Court annulled the suspension on 13 February 2026.

On 20 February 2026 the CEM elected Milena Milotinova as Director General with the three votes of Simona Veleva, Gabriela Naplatanova and Kadrinka Kadrinova. A BNT reporter from 1990, Milotinova was a member of parliament from 2001 to 2005, when she chaired the Media Committee. On 23 February the CEM endorsed four new members of the Management Board, Ivelina Dimitrova, Elena Yaramova-Sokacheva, Vera Aleksandrova and Georgi Slanchev, replacing the three members elected in 2019, and on 24 February the Administrative Court of Sofia Region rejected Koshlukov’s request to suspend her election. The CEM unanimously approved her management programme on 12 June 2026.

The European Commission’s 2026 rule of law chapter on Bulgaria notes the election of a new Director-General after a series of unsuccessful selection procedures and legal appeals, but reports stakeholders’ concerns about the lack of legislative safeguards, notably those preventing the Director-General’s term from being extended indefinitely. It adds that the CEM reported that pressure from the previous Director-General restricted its ability to fulfil its function in the selection process, and that no laws had 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

BNT is financed by a state budget subsidy, advertising revenue and other sources. The Radio and Television Act provides for a Radio and Television Fund financed by a fee, but the fund never started operating and remained only on paper; the date for switching to fund financing is reset each year in the Act’s transitional provisions and now stands at 1 January 2027. In 2019 the state subsidy for BNT was BGN 67.7 million.

BNT’s 2025 budget was BGN 93.6 million (EUR 47.9 million). After the government resigned on 11 December 2025 amid mass protests, Bulgaria, which adopted the euro on 1 January 2026, operated under an extension law until the National Assembly adopted the 2026 State Budget Act on 24 July 2026. The Act allocates BNT EUR 49.5 million, including EUR 3.1 million as a grant for tangible fixed assets, and requires the Minister of Culture to submit by 30 September 2026 a draft amendment to the Radio and Television Act to bring the fund and the financing of BNR and BNT into line with the Public Finance Act and state aid rules.

Presenting BNT’s proposed 2026 budget to the parliamentary culture and media committee in July, Milotinova projected revenue of EUR 5.4 million in addition to the state subsidy, against expenditure of EUR 55.781 million, and described the increase in state funding per programme hour as far from sufficient. In September 2026 the Council of Ministers approved an additional EUR 10 million for BNT to cover overdue obligations for terrestrial digital broadcasting of its programmes. Milotinova told the CEM that the new management had inherited obligations of EUR 10 million from its predecessor.

Editorial independence

Reporters Without Borders found in August 2021 that BNT had violated its legal obligation to provide unbiased coverage of the campaign for the parliamentary elections of 11 July 2021, citing an OSCE finding that GERB received 17 of the 28 minutes given to all contestants in BNT 1’s prime-time news. It described Koshlukov as a political appointee who had been a programme director at the TV channel of the far-right Ataka party. A media capture monitoring report published in December 2024 concluded that the autonomy of BNT and BNR was further eroded by the challenges to the CEM’s credibility, and that Koshlukov’s tenure had been marked by demonstrations accusing BNT of biased news coverage.

In November 2024 the Association of European Journalists – Bulgaria (AEJ-Bulgaria) asked BNT’s management to explain the departure of its news producer, Daniel Chipev, after dozens of BNT journalists reportedly signed a petition. A Media Freedom Rapid Response mission reported in October 2025 allegations that a documentary on Russian disinformation had been deliberately aired in a late-night slot, and criticism of a perceived politicisation of the management boards of BNT and BNR. In its preliminary findings on the early parliamentary elections of 19 April 2026, ODIHR noted that several interlocutors viewed the prolonged, dispute-marred election of the new Director General as highlighting vulnerabilities in the appointment mechanism, including political influence over public media governance, and that the public broadcasters generally abided by their legal obligations to grant free and paid airtime to all contestants.

On 21 May 2026 the new Management Board adopted editorial rules intended to guarantee the independence of BNT’s journalists, protect them from political and economic pressure and ensure non-interference in news and current affairs programmes, in line with the European Media Freedom Act; they state that Management Board members have no right to interfere in the selection of topics. At a CEM discussion on 22 July 2026, Management Board member Ivelina Dimitrova said that the Board cannot interfere in the editorial decisions of the teams, that editorial councils operated under the collective labour agreement and that producer councils and a Programme Council were to be introduced; the BNT journalist Dobrina Cheshmedjieva said that each team decides its own topics and interviewees. In September 2026, after the removal of a presenter from the programme History.BG, the party We Continue the Change requested parliamentary hearings of the Director General and the CEM chair. The Management Board rejected any attempt to turn a programming decision into a political issue, and AEJ-Bulgaria called for transparency while stating that summoning a director general to parliament to answer about external pressure is itself external pressure.

BNT’s Public Council was set up in January 2018 as an advisory body whose members are confirmed by the Management Board on the Director General’s proposal; its decisions are not binding on the Management Board, and the only position it has published is dated March 2018.

AI and digital policy

BNT introduced an artificial intelligence text-to-speech tool on bntnews.bg and its news application in December 2020. By April 2025 it had added AI-generated subtitles in Bulgarian, English, Romanian, Serbian, Greek and Ukrainian to the videos on bntnews.bg and the BNT NEWS application. No comprehensive published BNT policy governing the editorial use of generative artificial intelligence was located for this update; the editorial rules adopted in May 2026 do not explicitly address it.

Classification rationale

BNT retains its State-Controlled (SC) classification because it relies predominantly on state budget financing, its leadership is appointed through a regulator selected by political institutions, and independent monitoring has documented politically influenced editorial coverage. The appointment of new management in February 2026 and the introduction of editorial-independence safeguards represent significant developments, but their effectiveness in changing the broadcaster’s editorial practices had not been established for this review.