Radio Television of Vojvodina (RTV)

Radio Television of Vojvodina (Radio-televizija Vojvodine, RTV) is the provincial public service broadcaster of Vojvodina, an autonomous province of Serbia, with its seat in Novi Sad. It is known as Vajdasági Rádió és Televízió in Hungarian, Rádio-televízia Vojvodiny in Slovak and Radioteleviziunea Voivodinei in Romanian. It runs two television and three radio programmes, the youth internet radio O radio and the portal rtv.rs, and in 2025 it broadcast content in 15 languages. Its predecessor, Radio Novi Sad, began broadcasting on 29 November 1949 in Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian and Rusyn, and Television Novi Sad went on air on 26 November 1975. In May 2006 Radio Television of Serbia was divided into two public broadcasting institutions, RTS in Belgrade and RTV in Novi Sad. RTV’s building was destroyed in the NATO bombing in 1999, and its new headquarters at Mišeluk was completed in December 2019.

Media assets

Television: RTV 1, which broadcasts mainly in Serbian, and RTV 2, which carries the programmes of the editorial offices in the languages of national minorities.

Radio: Radio Novi Sad 1 (Serbian), Radio Novi Sad 2 (Hungarian) and Radio Novi Sad 3 (Slovak, Romanian, Rusyn, Ukrainian, Romani, Bunjevac, Macedonian and Croatian).

Online: the portal rtv.rs and O radio, a multimedia platform for young people that broadcasts in Serbian and English.

Music: the Grand Tamburica Orchestra and the Folk Orchestra.

Ownership and governance

Under the Law on Public Media Services, which also governs Radio Television of Serbia (RTS), RTV’s capital is in state ownership and the assets it uses are owned by the Republic of Serbia or the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, and it must provide at least two television and three radio programmes in the province. Its bodies are the Managing Board, the Director General and the Programme Council. The Council of the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Media (REM) appoints the nine members of the Managing Board for five years by a two-thirds majority of its members; the Board appoints the Director General for five years, after a public competition, by a two-thirds majority; and the Director General appoints the editors-in-chief, after a public competition, for four years. The law provides for an 11-member Programme Council, chosen by a committee of the Assembly of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina for a single four-year term.

The REM Council is required to call a public competition six months before the mandates of Managing Board members expire, but it did not do so because it had not been constituted. The five-year mandates of five of the Board’s nine members expired on 13 July 2026, leaving four in office. The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) noted that the prolonged absence of a constituted REM Council created a legal vacuum that affected, among others, the governance of the public service broadcasters RTS and RTV. The mandate of RTV’s Programme Council ended on 14 December 2025, although the competition for its new members should have been called by 14 June 2025. The Journalists’ Association of Serbia (UNS) reported in August 2026 that, without a Programme Council, there had been no conditions to elect the Commissioner for the protection of the rights of listeners, viewers and readers introduced by amendments to the law adopted on 16 June 2025. UNS also reported in August 2026 that it was not known whether the managing boards of RTV and RTS had continued to work, and on 22 September 2026 the REM Council elected its president, Stevica Smederevac.

RTV had no permanent Director General after Miodrag Koprivica’s mandate expired in July 2021. Goran Karadžić, a former president of the Council of the Republic Broadcasting Agency, the regulator now called REM, was appointed acting Director General on 4 September 2023, and on 20 October 2023 the Managing Board unanimously elected him Director General at the third competition, the first two having produced no appointment.

The European Commission’s 2025 report on Serbia notes that permanent RTV editors-in-chief, whose posts have been filled on an acting basis since 2023, and a programme director had not been appointed. In February 2025 RTV’s two representative trade unions filed a criminal complaint against Karadžić, accusing him of failing since October 2023 to propose competitions for the editors-in-chief to the Managing Board, and in March 2025, after a meeting with the unions, he signed a request for competitions for all seven editors-in-chief and the programme directors. On 7 October 2025 the Managing Board annulled the competitions, in line with an opinion of the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications that they had to be annulled because the amended law had entered into force on 25 June, after they were announced. New competitions were called at the end of December 2025, and in July 2026 Karadžić appointed Vesna Iskrin editor-in-chief of the web newsroom but chose none of the candidates for Radio Novi Sad 1 and 3 and O radio, appointing acting editors instead. On 7 September 2026 UNS reported that Karadžić had confirmed the appointment of Atila Marton as acting editor-in-chief of the Second Television Programme and of Andrea Juhas as acting editor-in-chief of the Second Radio Programme, for which no candidate had applied. The trade union Nezavisnost said in June 2026 that the competition had been turned into a mere formality behind which staffing decisions are made according to political needs.

Source of funding and budget

RTV is financed mainly from a fee collected through electricity bills; fee revenue collected in Vojvodina is split 70 per cent to RTV and 30 per cent to RTS, fee revenue collected elsewhere in Serbia goes to RTS, and RTS and RTV pay the electricity supplier a monthly fee of 3 per cent of the amounts transferred for billing and collecting it. The fee rose from RSD 299 to RSD 349 a month from 1 August 2024; in January 2026 the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications refused the increase to RSD 387.32 proposed by the managing boards of RTS and RTV, and an amendment of August 2026 set it at a minimum of RSD 349. The same amendment provides that RTV is partly financed from the budget of the Republic of Serbia until 31 December 2027; its sponsor argued that the fee collected was not sufficient for RTV. The European Commission noted that it remains to be seen whether the fee is sufficient to cover the needs of the public broadcasters or whether they still need to rely on additional state funding, which would prevent full financial independence. Television advertising on the public broadcasters may not exceed 10 per cent of each full hour.

According to its annual business reports, RTV’s total revenue fell from RSD 4.37 billion in 2024 to RSD 4.09 billion in 2025, and its net profit from RSD 211.4 million to RSD 90.6 million. The comparison is affected by the RSD 364.4 million that RTV received from the provincial budget in 2024 for the voluntary departure of staff, which did not recur in 2025: without it, total revenue in 2024 would have been RSD 4.01 billion, below the 2025 figure. Fee revenue rose from RSD 2.50 billion in 2024 to RSD 2.75 billion in 2025, when it made up 67.31 per cent of revenue, while the state budget subsidy fell from RSD 975 million, of which RSD 900 million came from the Republic and RSD 75 million from the province, to RSD 900 million; its marketing and commercial revenue, a broader category than advertising, was RSD 100.3 million in 2024 and RSD 101.1 million in 2025. In 2024, 102 journalists, editors and media workers left under the voluntary departure programme at the end of August 2024. RTV had 1,149 employees at the end of 2025, and its auditor gave unqualified opinions on its financial statements for 2024 and 2025.

The headquarters at Mišeluk was built and equipped with provincial funds: according to the State Audit Institution, the province provided RSD 3.22 billion on its construction from 2016 to 2019 and RSD 1.32 billion on its technical equipment in 2019 and 2020. In a 2022 audit the State Audit Institution found that employees in the same posts had different pay coefficients, contrary to the Labour Law, and in December 2023 it assessed RTV’s corrective measures, taken and planned, as satisfactory; a new collective agreement adopted on 9 May 2025 sets the coefficients for each post.

Editorial independence

The law guarantees the public media services editorial independence and provides that state budget funding may not be made conditional on a change of editorial policy. In its section on the public service broadcasters, the European Commission’s 2025 report found that concerns over editorial autonomy, limited pluralism and biased reporting in favour of the government increased. A case study of RTV by Siniša Isakov, published by the OSCE Mission to Serbia in 2026 as the author’s own views, finds that the news programme of RTV’s First Television Programme has been openly put at the service of the executive, that after the collapse of the canopy at the Novi Sad railway station in November 2024 RTV relied on statements by the executive and mostly aired reports by Tanjug and RTS instead of its own, and that its First Programme offers no analysis, debate or room for differing opinions. The author also identifies exceptions: the daily interview programme Pravi ugao hosts guests from both sides of the political spectrum and public life, and the morning show of the First Radio Programme informs impartially about daily events, including the protests of students and citizens, while individual authors manage to keep professional standards within their formats.

RTV’s 17:00 news bulletin on 15 November 2024 made no mention of the 14 minutes of silence that brought Novi Sad to a halt in memory of the canopy’s victims, and an analysis by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty of RTV’s Dnevnik news bulletin between 21 November and 3 December 2024 found that it had not carried a single analytical item on the causes of the collapse. Riot police were inside RTV’s building on 27 December 2024, when staff who had announced a strike demanded the dismissal of the First Programme’s editor-in-chief and students protested outside. In February 2025 some employees read a free news bulletin in front of the building and demanded the dismissal of Karadžić and of Nenad Ćaćić, the acting editor-in-chief of the First Television Programme, and in March 2025 two trade union leaders went on hunger strike inside the building, demanding, among other things, Ćaćić’s dismissal, competitions for the editors-in-chief and the departure of the police who had been in the building for more than a month. Ćaćić has held his post on an acting basis since the end of July 2021.

Students blockaded RTV’s building in Novi Sad for 22 hours on 10 and 11 March 2025, in solidarity with the blockade of RTS in Belgrade, and again on the night of 14 April, saying that RTV had not reported on the students cycling to Strasbourg. Karadžić called the protest terrorism and said that RTV staff had been kidnapped by a group of vandals who call themselves students, and gendarmerie and riot police arrived at the building shortly before 5 a.m. on 15 April. The Commission noted that students and citizens blocked the main buildings of RTS and RTV in March and April 2025, demanding more objective reporting on the protests.

Ahead of the early parliamentary elections called for 25 October 2026, part of RTV’s staff held a one-hour strike on 21 September, in which the union demanded a higher wage base and its leader called on RTV to stop favouring the government. On 7 October the Independent Journalists’ Association of Vojvodina (NDNV) demanded Karadžić’s dismissal after a photograph showed him welcoming Aleksandar Vučić in Banoštor during the election campaign. REM opened proceedings against RTV, RTS and four other broadcasters over campaign items in which children appeared, and on 14 October a majority of the Council found no breach of the law and discontinued the proceedings without sanctions.

AI and digital policy

No publicly available RTV policy on artificial intelligence (AI) was identified for this update. According to its 2025 annual report, RTV began initial testing, assessment and design of the use of AI in the work processes of its multimedia programme and across the institution, and automated the initial handling of radio files for its listen-again service.

Serbia is preparing its first law on AI, and the Code of Journalists of Serbia, adopted by the journalists’ associations UNS and NUNS and published by the Press Council, requires content created with AI-based tools to be under editorial control and media to inform the public when such tools have been used.

Classification rationale

RTV retains the Captured Public/State-Managed (CaPu) classification in 2026. It is a public service broadcaster financed mainly by a fee and guaranteed editorial independence by law, yet the evidence on its main news output points to government-favouring coverage: the OSCE-published case study finds that the news programme of the First Television Programme has been put at the service of the executive, an RFE/RL analysis found no analytical item on the causes of the canopy collapse in its Dnevnik between 21 November and 3 December 2024, and the European Commission found that concerns over biased reporting in favour of the government increased among the public service broadcasters. Its editorial governance is also weak: the mandates of most Managing Board members and of the Programme Council have expired, and key editorial posts remain filled by acting editors. Individual programmes retain editorial autonomy, as the same study recognises for Pravi ugao and the morning show of the First Radio Programme.

October 2026