Lithuanian National Radio and Television (LRT)

Lithuanian National Radio and Television (Lietuvos nacionalinis radijas ir televizija, LRT) is Lithuania’s public service broadcaster, established by law as an independent public institution. Its radio dates to 1926, with the first broadcast on 12 June 1926, and its television has been broadcasting since 1957. It operates three television channels, four radio stations and the LRT.lt portal, and had 661 employees at the end of 2024. Monika Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė has been Director General since 2018.

Media assets

Television: LRT Televizija, LRT Plius and LRT Lituanica, an online channel for the Lithuanian diaspora.

Radio: LRT Radijas, LRT Klasika, LRT Opus and LRT 100, an online station launched in 2026 to mark LRT’s centenary.

Digital: the LRT.lt portal, in Lithuanian, English, Polish and Russian; the Mediateka and Radioteka archives; and the LRT EPIKA video-on-demand service.

Ownership and governance

LRT is governed by its Council and its Director General. Under the law in force until the end of 2026, the Council has 12 members appointed for six years: four by the President, four by the Seimas, two of them from candidates proposed by the opposition, and one each by the Lithuanian Science Council, the Lithuanian Education Council, the Lithuanian Association of Art Creators and the Lithuanian Bishops’ Conference. Mindaugas Jurkynas, a presidential appointee, was elected chair on 18 March 2025.

The Council appointed Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė in 2018 from a field of 11 candidates and re-elected her on 3 October 2023 with seven votes of the 12, after two earlier votes that year had ended in ties.

In November 2025 the ruling coalition, which then included Nemuno aušra, advanced a bill to make dismissing the Director General easier. The Seimas approved it at the first stage on 27 November by 60 votes to 45, and after deliberation on 17 December by 67 votes to 47, in a version that would have allowed dismissal by seven Council members in a secret ballot. Police estimated that about 10,000 people rallied outside the Seimas on 9 December. On 22 December President Gitanas Nausėda said that such serious legal changes could not be made under an expedited procedure, and a Seimas working group drafted a new version. The Venice Commission recommended in March 2026 maintaining the existing qualified majority for dismissal and reviewing the funding freeze.

The Seimas adopted the revised law on 2 June 2026 by 77 votes to 1, with the opposition not taking part in the vote, and it took effect on 13 June. It retains the two-thirds Council majority for dismissing the Director General but adds grounds such as a gross breach of duties or loss of impeccable reputation, which took effect on 13 June and apply to Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė during her current term. From 1 January 2027 the Council will have 15 members appointed for four years: four by the President, four by the Seimas, two of them from opposition candidates, and seven by organisations, including three new ones, the Union of Local Community Organisations, the National NGO Coalition and the Lithuanian Disability Organisations Forum. A five-member management board, appointed by the Council after a public competition, is to take office in 2028. On 23 September 2026 the Constitutional Court accepted a petition challenging the law from 37 members of the Seimas from the Homeland Union–Lithuanian Christian Democrats, the Liberal Movement and the Democrats “For Lithuania”.

On 19 May 2026 the Council declined to approve LRT’s 2025 annual report, requesting revisions. The revised report was approved in June. On 22 September a Council majority found that the Director General had improperly performed her duties by failing to disclose the identities of individual service providers in LRT’s programme procurement reports, which LRT had withheld on data protection grounds. The Council did not classify the matter as a gross breach. Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė disputed the finding and asked the Council in October to reconsider it.

Source of funding and budget

LRT does not carry advertising, except advertising or sponsorship announcements it is contractually obliged to air under rights acquired to broadcast sports, cultural or other events of high public interest, and is financed from the state budget under a formula set in the LRT Law. From 2015 to 2020 it received 1.5 per cent of personal income tax revenue and 1.3 per cent of excise revenue collected in the year before last; from 2021 the income tax share was 1 per cent, with a floor equal to the 2019 appropriation. On a petition by the government, the Constitutional Court ruled on 3 November 2020 that the model did not violate the Constitution.

State budget appropriations to LRT were EUR 53.79 million in 2021, EUR 55.43 million in 2022, EUR 63.44 million in 2023, EUR 72.9 million in 2024 and EUR 79.6 million in 2025. Content accounted for 57.2 per cent of spending in 2024 and 58.9 per cent in 2025.

On 27 November 2025 the Seimas adopted, by 70 votes to none with two abstentions, a proposal by Remigijus Žemaitaitis of Nemuno aušra and other members to freeze LRT’s appropriations for 2026–2028 at the 2025 level of EUR 79.6 million, against about EUR 88.2 million that the formula would have provided in 2026. From 2029 the shares fall to 0.75 per cent of personal income tax and 0.8 per cent of excise revenue. Part of the difference was redirected to cultural projects, including an exhibition in Japan. The Constitutional Court accepted a petition from opposition members of the Seimas against the freeze on 5 February 2026. The European Commission’s 2026 rule of law chapter describes the governance and funding framework of the public broadcaster as challenging. In October 2026 Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius asked the Ministry of Culture to review the funding model.

Editorial independence

The LRT Law requires LRT to act independently and impartially, without political or other external influence. The June 2026 amendments also explicitly protect editorial decision-making from political or other external influence and provide for editorial policy guidelines approved jointly by the heads of LRT’s radio, television and online news operations. An ethics controller, appointed by the Council through a public competition for five years, oversees compliance with the ethics code and handles complaints about content. The post was created in 2021, and Daina Elena Andrikienė held it from 2021. Aistė Žilinskienė, appointed in February 2025, left in April 2026, and a new competition was announced on 17 August 2026. Until a new controller is appointed, ethics matters are overseen by LRT’s Editorial Policy Oversight Commission.

The 2025–2026 proposals drew sustained criticism. Media Freedom Rapid Response partners warned on 4 December 2025 that the amendments risked weakening LRT’s editorial independence, and the European Parliament asked the Commission on 22 January 2026 to assess the changes against the European Media Freedom Act. Protests ran from December 2025 to April 2026, and a petition gathered more than 145,000 signatures. On 1 June 2026, before the final vote, Reporters Without Borders said that “applying a new dismissal procedure retroactively to a sitting director is precisely the kind of political interference in public media governance that international standards are designed to prevent”. On 10 June the European Broadcasting Union and press-freedom organisations wrote to the Lithuanian authorities that genuine independence requires a governance structure insulated from political influence.

The government that pursued the changes, led by Inga Ruginienė with Nemuno aušra as a partner, resigned on 23 June 2026. Sinkevičius’s government, without Nemuno aušra, was sworn in on 14 July.

Reporters Without Borders notes increased political pressure on LRT and the weakening of safeguards protecting its independence. LRT reports that 70 per cent of respondents trusted it in a 2025 Spinter Research survey.

No independent systematic assessment establishing sustained government-directed editorial coverage at LRT was located for this review.

AI and digital policy

LRT has adopted principles for the use of artificial intelligence under which it retains full editorial responsibility for AI-generated content, labels AI-generated fragments clearly and has AI tools vetted by IT specialists; they apply to staff and external producers. Since 27 June 2025 the LRT.lt live television stream has carried round-the-clock subtitles with machine translation into English, Polish, Ukrainian and Russian. From August 2026 LRT uses AI voices for translations in television news reports in exceptional cases, marking them on air with special symbols.

Classification rationale

LRT is classified as Independent State Funded (ISF) from the 2026 review cycle, having been classified Independent Public (IP) from 2022 to 2025. The earlier classification rested largely on an automatic statutory formula that tied LRT’s appropriations to tax revenue and insulated them from annual political decisions, a model the Constitutional Court upheld in 2020. In November 2025 the Seimas overrode that formula, freezing LRT’s appropriations for 2026–2028 at the 2025 level, reducing the tax-linked shares from 2029 and redirecting part of the difference to other spending. The intervention showed that a parliamentary majority can set LRT’s funding outside the formula, which weakens the financial independence on which the IP classification depended; LRT remains financed predominantly from the state budget. The classification stops short of Independent State Funded and State Managed (ISFM): the Council’s politically appointed members are selected through several institutions, including the opposition, their terms are protected, the two-thirds Council majority for dismissing the Director General has been retained, and statutory safeguards protect editorial decision-making. Despite increasing political pressure, sustained government control over management or editorial coverage was not established for this review.

October 2026