Macedonian Radio Television (MRT)

Macedonian Radio Television (Makedonska radio-televizija, MRT) is North Macedonia’s public broadcasting service, which operates as a public broadcasting enterprise (Javno radiodifuzno pretprijatie, JRP MRT). Macedonian Radio was founded on 28 December 1944 and Macedonian Television on 14 December 1964. MRT joined the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in 1993. Its legal transformation from a state into a public broadcaster began with the 1997 Law on Broadcasting Activity and was formally completed with the 2005 broadcasting law, although its institutional and programmatic transformation remained incomplete, and its current legal framework is the Law on Audio and Audiovisual Media Services (LAAMS) of December 2013. MRT is funded from the state budget, operates five terrestrial television channels and four radio stations, and broadcasts television content in seven languages, while its radio is available in 11. Zoran Ristoski has been its director since April 2026.

Media assets

Television: MRT 1, the main channel; MRT 2, the channel of the Albanian community; MRT 3, with sport, film and entertainment; MRT 4, the channel of the other ethnic communities; MRT 5, with children’s programming; and the Parliamentary Channel; as well as the satellite channels MRT 1 SAT and MRT 2 SAT.

Radio: Macedonian Radio 1, 2 and 3 (MR 1, MR 2, MR 3) and MR SAT.

Digital: the mrt.com.mk portal, the MRT Play streaming platform and the MRT Archive.

Ownership and governance

Under the LAAMS, MRT’s bodies include the Programme Council, a Supervisory Board that oversees its financial operations, and the director. Since amendments adopted in December 2018, the members of the Programme Council have been appointed by the Assembly after a public competition and a public hearing, from a list drawn up by its Committee on Elections and Appointments by a two-thirds majority, which may not include more than two candidates backed by the same supporter. Appointment requires a two-thirds majority of all MPs, including a majority of the MPs from the non-majority communities, and members serve five-year terms, renewable once. The Council has 13 members, and candidates must be supported by at least two civil society organisations, a journalists’ association, two cultural associations, a relevant information and communication technology association or chamber, or two higher education institutions. The Programme Council elects the seven members of the Supervisory Board and, after a public competition, the director.

The mandate of the previous Programme Council expired in December 2019, according to the Association of Journalists of Macedonia (AJM), and the Assembly’s Committee on Elections and Appointments failed to agree a list of candidates, which requires a two-thirds majority in both the committee and the plenary. Under the LAAMS, the outgoing members and the director remained in office until their successors were elected. AJM and other organisations warned of the risks of partisanship and insufficient transparency in the 2025 procedure, and on 24 June 2025 the Assembly elected the new Programme Council with the votes of 91 MPs, including 20 from the non-majority communities.

The Supervisory Board elected in February 2020 for five years saw its mandate end in March 2025, and in October 2025 the Programme Council recorded that MRT had no elected Supervisory Board. On 16 December 2025 the Programme Council elected a new seven-member Supervisory Board.

Marjan Cvetkovski led MRT from 2012, and AJM described his re-election in February 2018 as the result of strong pressure on Programme Council members from the then-opposition VMRO-DPMNE and the governing DUI. After a public call published in March 2026 for a three-year term, the Programme Council elected Zoran Ristoski, a long-time owner of the Grey Worldwide marketing agency, as director on 23 April 2026 with the votes of 12 of its 13 members. The EBU described it as the first appointment to the post since 2018. The Programme Council stated that the selection rested solely on the quality of the proposed programme and the fulfilment of the legal criteria, with programmes submitted under a code without sight of the candidates’ identities, while the opposition criticised it, saying that he had been chosen because he was a friend of Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski from his youth. In July 2026 Džuljian Šabani was elected deputy director, and the new management appointed new editors-in-chief of MRT 1, MRT 2, MRT 3 and the Parliamentary Channel.

The Programme Council adopted a new MRT Statute on 5 March 2026, after obtaining the Supervisory Board’s consent, with the votes of all 13 members, replacing the Statute of 2019. The European Commission’s 2026 rule of law chapter on North Macedonia reports that the Programme Council and other stakeholders are requesting a specific law on MRT and, according to MRT, that it is transitioning from a public broadcasting service to a public media service.

Source of funding and budget

MRT was long financed mainly by a monthly broadcasting fee, which amendments to the Law on Broadcasting reported in early 2012 raised from MKD 120 to MKD 190 (about EUR 3); in 2015, the best year for collection in five years, 75.82 per cent of the invoiced amount was collected. On 19 September 2017 the Assembly abolished the fee and replaced it with funding from the state budget of 0.5 per cent of the budget annually. Amendments adopted in December 2018 set the allocation at 0.8 per cent of the total revenue realised in the previous year in 2019, rising to 1 per cent from 2021, of which MRT received 74.5 per cent, provided that this did not disturb the fair distribution of budget funds. The Agency for Audio and Audiovisual Media Services (AVMU) calculated that from 2018 to 2023 MRT received MKD 2,798.84 million (about EUR 45.5 million) less than the law prescribed.

Under amendments adopted in July 2023, the state budget allocates 1 per cent of the realised tax revenues shown in the last adopted final budget account, of which 80 per cent goes to MRT, 15 per cent to the transmission company Macedonian Broadcasting (MRD) and 5 per cent to the AVMU. The government did not apply the new formula in 2023. In 2024 the legally prescribed funds were transferred in full for the first time in nearly seven years, and MRT received MKD 80 million as the first instalment of its unpaid 2023 funds under an out-of-court settlement with the Ministry of Digital Transformation. The 2025 budget rebalance reduced MRT’s allocation by MKD 80 million to MKD 1,181.86 million, and the Commission’s 2026 rule of law chapter states that the 2026 allocation is EUR 123,600 below the amount prescribed by law. A government bill of July 2026 would set the funds for five-year periods at 1 per cent of the realised tax revenues in the last adopted final budget account. In May 2026, reacting to the government’s decision to prepare this change, AJM warned that reducing the budget base without public debate creates a risk that MRT’s reforms will remain declarative. A parliamentary committee approved the bill in first reading, as reported on 1 September 2026.

In 2023 MRT’s revenue was MKD 1,000.44 million (about EUR 16.3 million), of which MKD 670.5 million (67 per cent) came from the state budget allocation for broadcasting and a further MKD 300 million from the Ministry of Information Society and Administration for programme and technical development, so that state sources made up about 97 per cent, while 1.2 per cent came from advertising; it recorded a loss of MKD 131.77 million. In 2024 it reported revenue of MKD 1,365.55 million (about EUR 22.2 million) and a profit of MKD 87.81 million, its best financial result in six years. In 2025 its revenue fell by 11.09 per cent to MKD 1,214.15 million, of which state budget funding for broadcasting provided MKD 1,181.86 million, or 97.34 per cent; its costs amounted to MKD 1,247.10 million, producing a loss of MKD 32.95 million, and it had 587 employees at year-end, 43 fewer than a year earlier. In May 2026 Ristoski criticised MRT’s production capacity, obsolete equipment and ageing workforce, of barely 600 employees with an average age above 58, while saying that news production had already been brought fully in-house. The State Audit Office gave a qualified opinion on MRT’s financial statements in 2022, citing among other things the lack of an internal audit unit, and the Commission’s 2025 report on North Macedonia states that MRT has yet to settle its outstanding debts.

Editorial independence

In its index for 2024, AJM stated that the LAAMS only partially guarantees the autonomy and independence of MRT: its Article 61 guarantees the right to independence for editors and journalists, but no explicit provision ensures that MRT’s news departments are independent and autonomous in programme creation. MRT’s Code of Ethics applies to all its employees; in its index for 2023, AJM considered its biggest shortcoming to be the confusion of journalistic ethics with work discipline, reported that its Ethics Commission had not received a single complaint, and stated that MRT took no action in 2023 on the amendments AJM requested in 2021. According to AJM’s index for 2025, the new Programme Council initiated activities on the Code.

Article 95 of MRT’s Statute, adopted on 5 March 2026, provides that the work of responsible editors should be independent of any influence from external subjects and institutions or from MRT’s management bodies, so as to distinguish editorial policy from management policy. It requires committees for the selection or procurement of programme content to include editorial representation, and provides that the director and other MRT bodies do not give directions that could influence the selection, alteration or cancellation of content for political, economic or personal interests.

ODIHR found that in the 2024 presidential and parliamentary elections MRT covered all contestants in line with the legal provisions for allocating time to political parties in newscasts. For the 2025 local elections, it assessed coverage in both public and private broadcast media as overall balanced in tone, but found that the legal quotas for newscasts limit the broadcaster’s editorial independence and recommended revising them to better safeguard it.

The Commission’s 2025 report states that despite improved funding the public service broadcaster continues to face significant challenges, particularly regarding its institutional autonomy, and that limited administrative autonomy remains a barrier to recruiting new staff; its 2026 rule of law chapter attributes MRT’s challenges to limited administrative autonomy and irregular funding. AJM concluded in its index for 2024 that MRT is still not free from systemic political influences, and in its index for 2025 that no direct pressure from the government on MRT’s newsrooms or individual journalists was registered, but that structural forms of pressure persist.

AI and digital policy

Article 14 of MRT’s 2026 Statute commits it to the continuous training and professional development of its employees, including in digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI), in line with its capacities and internal acts, but no separate, publicly available MRT policy governing the editorial use of AI was identified for this update. In a NarativAI assessment of the transparency and digital and AI readiness of seven public broadcasters in the Western Balkans and Croatia, conducted in October and November 2025, MRT scored 50 out of 100, jointly with Croatia’s HRT the lowest result.

The Code of Journalists of Macedonia, published on AJM’s website in July 2026, requires journalistic content created with AI to be clearly labelled and states that a journalistic product must not be entirely AI-generated content.

Classification rationale

MRT was classified State-Controlled (SC) from 2022 to 2025 and is reclassified as Independent State Funded and State Managed (ISFM) in 2026. It is funded almost entirely from the state budget and its Programme Council is appointed by the Assembly, which makes it state funded and state managed. The typology reserves the SC category for media that follow an editorial line imposed or approved by state authorities, as this review did not establish that MRT’s coverage is directed in this way: AJM registered no direct government pressure on MRT’s newsrooms or individual journalists in its index for 2025, ODIHR assessed coverage of the 2025 local elections as overall balanced in tone, and the Statute adopted in March 2026 separates editorial policy from management policy. The election of the Programme Council in June 2025 also ended the period, since December 2019, in which MRT was run by bodies whose mandates had expired. The structural pressures identified by AJM, the European Commission’s concerns about MRT’s institutional autonomy and irregular funding, and the contested appointment of its new director remain; thus, MRT’s coverage under its new management warrants continued review.

October 2026