Czech Radio (ČRo)

Czech Radio (Český rozhlas, ČRo) is the public radio broadcaster in Czechia. Regular broadcasting began on 18 May 1923, from a tent near the Kbely airfield in Prague, and Czech coverage of its centenary records that only the BBC has broadcast regularly in Europe for longer. Czech Radio operates 25 services: four nationwide stations, six specialised stations, fourteen regional stations and the international service Radio Prague International.

Media assets

Radio, nationwide: ČRo Radiožurnál, ČRo Dvojka, ČRo Vltava, ČRo Plus. Specialised: ČRo Radiožurnál Sport, ČRo Radio Wave, ČRo Rádio Junior, ČRo D-Dur, ČRo Jazz, ČRo Pohoda. Regional: ČRo Brno, ČRo České Budějovice, ČRo Hradec Králové, ČRo Karlovy Vary, ČRo Liberec, ČRo Olomouc, ČRo Ostrava, ČRo Pardubice, ČRo Plzeň, ČRo Rádio Praha, ČRo Střední Čechy, ČRo Sever, ČRo Vysočina, ČRo Zlín. International: Radio Prague International, publishing in seven languages. Digital: iROZHLAS.cz and mujRozhlas.

Ownership and governance

Czech Radio is governed on the same model as Czech Television. It was established under Act No. 484/1991 Coll. on Czech Radio as a public corporation providing public-service radio and accountable to the public rather than to the state.

Its governing body is the Czech Radio Council, which has nine members. Since Act No. 225/2023 Coll., in force from 1 October 2023, six are elected and recalled by the Chamber of Deputies and three by the Senate. Members serve six-year terms and are drawn from nominations by organisations representing cultural, regional, social, trade-union, employer, religious, educational, scientific, environmental and national interests. Membership is incompatible with the presidency, a parliamentary seat, government office, the judiciary, the prosecution service, the Supreme Audit Office, the Czech National Bank board, the Public Defender of Rights and other public-administration posts, as well as with office in a political party or movement and with media business interests. A Supervisory Commission of five members, elected by the Council, oversees financial management and reports to it.

The Council also appoints and may dismiss the Director General. René Zavoral began his first term on 21 January 2016 and was re-elected on 25 August 2021, by seven of the nine councillors in a secret ballot in which a two-thirds majority of all members was required, as the only eligible candidate after two of the three applications were excluded for not meeting the formal requirements. His second six-year term began at the end of January 2022. He signed the broadcaster’s public-service memorandum with the Minister of Culture in October 2025 and represented Czech Radio throughout the 2026 funding dispute.

Both chambers filled Council seats on 27 May 2026. The Senate elected the media analyst Jitka Adamčíková at its fourth attempt, with 35 of the 68 votes cast, on a nomination from the Union of Journalists; she chairs the association Ženy v médiích, which she founded in 2023, and takes the seat of the former deputy chair Marek Pokorný. The Chamber elected the publicist and university lecturer Petr Žantovský with 91 votes. Žantovský previously sat on the Council for Radio and Television Broadcasting and on the Council of the Czech News Agency, and stood unsuccessfully for the Senate for the SPD in the Kolín constituency in 2020. The SPD is a party of the governing coalition formed after the October 2025 election.

Source of funding and budget

Czech Radio is funded by a licence fee paid by households and businesses, alongside limited commercial revenue permitted by law.

Act No. 119/2025 Coll., the velká mediální novela, took effect on 1 May 2025. The Senate approved it on 9 April 2025 with 47 of the 70 senators present. The monthly radio fee rose from CZK 45 to CZK 55, the first change since 2005. Czech Radio set out the change on its fee portal: any device able to receive broadcasts individually now counts as a receiver, including internet-connected computers and telephones, and businesses moved from receiver-based charging to charging by full-time-equivalent headcount, with those below the threshold paying nothing. The amendment also barred commercial messages from the broadcasters’ websites and introduced automatic indexation above a statutory inflation threshold.

The Council approved balanced budgets of CZK 2,367 million for 2024, on 11 December 2023, and CZK 2,358 million for 2025, on 18 December 2024, the latter CZK 9 million below the original 2024 figure and covering production and broadcasting for all 25 stations without wage increases. For 2026 it approved a balanced budget of CZK 2,736 million, CZK 378 million above the original 2025 figure, of which CZK 2,476 million, or 90.5 per cent, is licence-fee income; operating revenue is CZK 2,703 million, financial revenue CZK 33 million, personnel costs CZK 1,352 million and the investment plan CZK 200 million.

The broadcaster reported to the Council on 25 February 2026 that it collected CZK 2,316 million in 2025 against a plan of CZK 2,068 million, or 112 per cent, an increase of about 11 per cent year on year. Payments through the SIPO system supplied CZK 1,428 million, direct payments by legal entities CZK 498.7 million and businesses CZK 389.2 million. Registered receivers fell from 3,785,700 at the start of 2025 to 3,692,806 at the end, with business receivers down from 802,590 to 534,924 under the new charging model and direct payments by individuals up from 653,765 to 895,067. Receivables stood at CZK 139.7 million against CZK 104.7 million a year earlier.

A memorandum on the fulfilment of public service in radio broadcasting, signed on 14 October 2025 by Zavoral and the Minister of Culture, Martin Baxa, sets out how the broadcaster will discharge its statutory role in news, culture, education, regional output and digital services over 2025 to 2030. It followed the May 2025 amendment and a public consultation that drew more than 11,000 participants.

The funding model is now contested. Under the exemptions plan put forward in early 2026, Czech Radio put the loss at CZK 700 million to CZK 800 million a year, equivalent to about a third of its fee income, with roughly 660,000 households and more than 17,000 businesses taken out of liability; Zavoral said he had earlier offered to forgo about CZK 400 million a year, the amount the 2025 increase had added, and that the proposal would cost double that.

On 15 June 2026 the cabinet approved a bill abolishing the television and radio fees altogether and funding both broadcasters from the Ministry of Culture’s budget chapter. The allocation would be CZK 2,065 million for Czech Radio, CZK 411 million below its 2026 fee plan and within CZK 3 million of the CZK 2,068 million it had planned to collect in 2025, before the increase. The government submitted the bill to the Chamber of Deputies on 19 June as parliamentary print 231; the Organisational Committee recommended it for consideration on 24 June, but as of 8 October 2026 it had not received a first reading and was listed for the session beginning 13 October. Ministers conceded during the summer that it would not take effect on 1 January 2027, and reporting in early October indicated that the change could slip to 2028. A separate bill from the ANO deputy Patrik Nacher would instead broaden exemptions from the existing fee, and the cabinet gave it a favourable opinion in June while maintaining that its own bill takes precedence.

In an interview with Hospodářské noviny, Zavoral said in April 2026 that on the exemptions proposals then before Parliament Czech Radio would have to close up to 19 of its 25 stations, leaving Radiožurnál, Dvojka, Vltava, D-Dur, Jazz and Radio Prague International. He named ČRo Pohoda, Rádio Junior and Radiožurnál Sport among those that would go, said Plus would be merged into Radiožurnál, and said all fourteen regional stations could close if the law did not require regional broadcasting. The warning addressed the exemptions proposals and a loss of CZK 700 million to CZK 800 million a year, not the later abolition bill. Staff at Czech Radio and Czech Television held a one-day strike on 22 June 2026; Czech Radio said more than 1,000 of its employees formally took part, and the two broadcasters together put the number of posts at risk at between 450 and 700.

Editorial independence

Czech Radio’s editorial agenda is not subject to obligations imposed by state authorities that would undermine its independence, and no evidence of sustained government direction of its output was established for this review.

Operations are governed by the Czech Radio Code, a binding internal regulation setting out obligations for editorial staff. The broadcaster lists two advisory bodies alongside the Council: an Ombudsman who receives complaints about output and other matters connected with the broadcaster, and an Ethics Commission of five independent experts advising the Director General on whether the broadcaster’s work meets professional-ethical and legal norms, principally the Code. The Commission has not operated continuously: the Director General restored it in April 2021 after four of its five members had resigned the previous year, one of them stating that it had not been convened for a year and that submissions went unanswered, while the broadcaster said internal consultation had been sufficient. Members are appointed by the Director General for the duration of his term. The Council publishes listener complaints together with its replies, and its register records a continuing flow of impartiality complaints through 2026.

Three episodes bear on the classification.

In January 2019 management refused to broadcast the series Matematika zločinu, a commissioned series by Brit Jensen and Magdalena Sodomková examining alleged failings in the Czech justice system, including a miscarriage of justice linked to a flawed expert opinion. The authors described the refusal as censorship. The series won the documentary prize at Prix Bohemia Radio, and an evaluator commissioned by the Fond nezávislé žurnalistiky, Jan Motal, found the authors had broadly complied with the Code while also identifying passages that needed revision. Czech Radio then published it as a podcast in a revised form at the end of July 2019. The broadcaster said the original had contained serious breaches of the Code, concerning impartiality and objectivity, and that publishing it unchanged would have undermined those standards; it also said it would seek a public apology from the authors. The news director, Jan Pokorný, rejected the censorship characterisation, saying that repeated editorial requests for change were ordinary editorial work rather than censorship and that the Code concerns included anonymous sources, recordings made with hidden microphones and material from unnamed people.

In July 2021 the news outlet Forum 24 reported that Czech Radio had struck from a paid announcement a phrase describing its weekly as independent of billionaires, with the legal department calling the wording a subjective assessment that could not be approved. Czech Radio rejected the account as untrue, stating that the item was a sponsorship announcement rather than an advertisement, that sponsorship announcements may not contain superlatives, comparisons, quality claims or evaluations of the sponsor, that the client’s first two drafts did not meet those rules, that the third was approved in both versions and that four compliant alternative wordings were offered. The academic article that the previous edition cited as analysing the episode as censorship could not be located for this review.

On 28 April 2021 the Council adopted Resolution 31/21, recording its dissatisfaction with the observance of objectivity, impartiality and balance in ČRo Plus broadcasting, on the basis of independent analyses, internal analyses and a persistent number of listener complaints, and calling on management to remedy insufficient diversity of opinion and to ensure more balanced representation of socially relevant viewpoints and groups. The resolution cited the Czech Radio Act and the Code, and passed by six votes to two. The vice-chair who brought the item, Tomáš Kňourek, said the station did not adequately cover euroscepticism, opposition to migration or criticism of social-media moderation, and read out a complaint calling for the station’s closure with which he said he agreed. Management disputed the finding: the news director, Jan Pokorný, said a supporting comparison quoted only critical passages from four analyses, and the station’s editor-in-chief, Petr Šabata, said the Russian ambassador had been invited repeatedly without success. The two councillors who voted against were Marek Pokorný and Ondřej Matouš, and Pokorný had his individual statement attached to the minutes, recording that the debate did not support a resolution that had been drafted beforehand. Zavoral called the wording harsh.

External concern since the October 2025 election has centred on governance and funding. In November 2025 Reporters Without Borders and the Czech Syndicate of Journalists warned that the incoming coalition programme could threaten public-media independence, naming abolition of the licence fee and possible structural changes to Czech Radio and Czech Television. In March 2026 the European Broadcasting Union, the European Federation of Journalists and ten other organisations called for consultation before any funding reform and for financing consistent with the European Media Freedom Act.

Classification rationale

Czech Radio moves from Captured Public/State-Managed to Independent Public (IP), provisionally.

Its institutional structure now closely matches that of Czech Television. Czech Radio is a public-law institution rather than a government-owned company, its principal funding comes from a statutory licence fee rather than an annual state appropriation, and its nine-member Council is divided between the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, with members elected from civil-society nominations and political officeholders excluded.

The previous classification rested on editorial controversies concentrated between 2019 and 2021. Re-examination weakens two of them. The commissioned Matematika zločinu podcast was ultimately published in revised form after an independent assessment identified concerns as well as broadly supporting the authors’ compliance with the Code. The 2021 Forum 24 dispute concerned the wording of a sponsorship announcement rather than newsroom output and produced no adjudicated finding of political interference.

The strongest evidence remains the Council’s resolution of 28 April 2021 criticising ČRo Plus for insufficient objectivity, impartiality and balance and pressing management to address the issue. The intervention demonstrates the capacity of the governing body to exert editorial pressure, but the available record does not establish that it acted on government instruction or imposed a pro-government editorial line. No comparable intervention has been documented since 2021. The Council’s published 2026 complaints record shows submissions from differing political perspectives and responses that seek management explanations or commission analyses.

The classification is provisional for two reasons. Petr Žantovský, a former SPD Senate candidate, was elected to the Council by the Chamber in May 2026, which raises the significance of future Council practice. More substantially, the governing coalition has introduced legislation abolishing the licence fee and replacing it with annual state-budget financing of CZK 2,065 million. As of 8 October 2026 the bill had not received its first reading. If enacted, it would remove a principal structural basis for the Independent Public classification and require a fresh assessment of the statutory safeguards and of political discretion over funding.

For now the licence-fee model remains in force and no evidence of sustained government direction of Czech Radio’s editorial output was established. IP therefore best reflects the current evidence, with provisional status pending the funding legislation and future Council practice.

October 2026