Romanian Radio Company (SRR)

The Romanian Radio Broadcasting Company (Societatea Română de Radiodifuziune, SRR), known as Radio România, is Romania’s public service radio broadcaster, which aired its first broadcast on 1 November 1928. It operates national and regional stations, an international service that broadcasts in Romanian, the Aromanian dialect and 11 foreign languages, a station in the Republic of Moldova and a press agency.

Media assets

Radio: National – Radio România Actualități, Radio Antena Satelor, Radio România Cultural, Radio România Muzical and Radio România 3Net “Florian Pittiș”, an online station; International – Radio Romania International (RRI) and Radio Chișinău, which broadcasts in the Republic of Moldova and is run through a Moldovan company, Pajura Albă, in which SRR holds a 99 per cent stake; Regional – Radio România București FM, Brașov FM, Cluj, Constanța, Craiova, Iași, Reșița, Târgu Mureș and Timișoara, with local stations in Sighet, Sibiu and Arad, and Radio România Bacău, founded in May 2026 as a sub-office of the Iași studio. Radio Chișinău was launched on 1 December 2011.

News agency: Rador, SRR’s press agency and media monitoring service, founded in 1990.

Other: six artistic ensembles – four music ensembles, including the National Radio Orchestra, and two choirs – and the publishing house Editura Casa Radio.

Digital: the radioromania.ro portal, which carries live streams of SRR’s stations and podcasts, and Radio România Tezaur, an online-only station launched by SRR that broadcasts folk music and archive recordings.

Ownership and governance

Law 41 of 1994 establishes SRR, together with the public television broadcaster, as an autonomous public service of national interest that is editorially independent, and the Constitution provides that public radio and television services are autonomous. Under the law, SRR is run by a Board of Administration whose members Parliament appoints by voting on the lists of candidates in a joint sitting of the two chambers, after hearings in the culture committees. The joint parliamentary groups propose candidates for eight seats according to their political configuration and weight in Parliament, and the parliamentary groups of the national minorities propose candidates for one seat. The other seats go to nominees of the President and the Government and to two representatives of SRR’s employees, making 13 members, appointed for four years. The chair of the board is SRR’s director general, in the post of president-director general. Parliament’s rejection of SRR’s annual report entails the dismissal of the board by law, as happened in May 2021.

Răzvan-Ioan Dincă, a theatre director and former head of the National Opera in Bucharest, was elected president-director general in November 2021 with the support of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) under a deal with the National Liberal Party (PNL) over the leadership of the public radio and television. His four-year mandate ended in November 2025, and an arrangement in the governing coalition allotted the leadership of TVR to PNL and of the public radio to Save Romania Union (USR). Parliament approved a new board on 18 November 2025 by 249 votes to 4, comprising three members nominated by PSD, two by USR and one each by the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), PNL and the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR), as well as nominees of the President, the Government and the national minorities and two employee representatives. The Government’s nominee was the Prime Minister’s spokesperson, Ioana Ene Dogioiu, whose appointment journalist associations criticised as incompatible with media independence. On 26 November 2025 Parliament approved Robert Schwartz, a USR nominee and former head of Deutsche Welle’s Romanian service, as president-director general by 241 votes to 2.

On 29 April 2026 the Constitutional Court upheld a challenge by AUR and ruled the parliamentary decision appointing the board unconstitutional as regards the designation of candidates by the joint parliamentary groups; the decision ceased to have effect when the ruling was published in the Official Gazette on 4 September 2026, and Schwartz lost his post. On 8 September the Permanent Bureaus of the two chambers appointed Dincă, proposed by PSD, as interim director general for 60 days, with the votes of PSD and AUR. On 6 October USR and PNL MPs filed a preliminary complaint seeking the revocation of the decisions appointing the interim heads of the public radio and television.

The European Commission’s 2026 rule of law chapter on Romania reports that the Government has set up an interinstitutional working group to improve the independent governance of public service media and align with the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), but that a draft has yet to be issued, and finds limited progress on its recommendation in this area.

Source of funding and budget

Until 1 February 2017 SRR was financed in part by a radio licence fee of RON 2.5 a month for individuals and up to RON 30 a month for legal entities, which Law 1/2017 abolished along with other non-fiscal fees. Its running and development costs have since been covered from the state budget through the annual budget law, and the share of state allocations in its revenue rose from 44.84 per cent in 2016 to 94.33 per cent in 2021.

According to its 2024 activity report, SRR’s revenue in 2024 was RON 454.2 million, of which RON 434.7 million came from the state budget, and its expenditure RON 453.8 million, leaving a net profit of RON 0.4 million; its own revenues amounted to RON 18.8 million, of which RON 7.8 million came from advertising, and its payments to the national transmission company Radiocom amounted to RON 147.7 million, or 33.97 per cent of its state allocation. Parliament’s budget committees approved an allocation of RON 446 million for 2025, 3.08 per cent more than in 2024, and in December 2025 the Government added RON 6 million from its reserve fund to pay Radiocom for broadcasting SRR’s programmes.

In March 2026 the budget committees approved a 2026 budget of RON 470 million for SRR, 5.45 per cent more than in 2025. Schwartz said that SRR needed RON 520 million to function in 2026 and that the allocation would not cover its current running costs, since salaries take about 62 per cent of the budget and Radiocom’s services 36 per cent. The Media and Journalism Research Center (MJRC) and the International Press Institute (IPI), in their media capture report on Romania covering developments up to September 2026, note that the public broadcasters’ budgets have fallen in real terms and that their funding model remains at odds with the EMFA’s requirement of adequate, sustainable and predictable funding. An emergency ordinance of December 2025 froze the salaries of SRR and TVR employees for 2026, and on 30 March 2026 the Federation of Culture and Mass-Media FAIR-MediaSind asked the European Commission and the European Parliament to assess Romania’s compliance with the EMFA and, where appropriate, to open infringement proceedings against Romania.

Editorial independence

Law 41 of 1994 protects SRR’s programmes from interference by public authorities, political parties, trade unions, commercial bodies and pressure groups, and the Constitution prohibits any form of censorship. The MJRC and IPI found in October 2024 that there are no independent bodies or mechanisms free from political influence to monitor the public broadcasters’ independence.

In July 2017 the union of Radio România employees condemned the editorial censorship it said the manager of Radio România Actualități, Dan Preda, and SRR’s interim director, Georgică Severin, had imposed, and journalists at the station accused the public radio’s leadership of serving PSD. In their 2024 report, the MJRC and IPI stated that the public broadcasters had been subjected to frequent allegations of politicisation, censorship, questionable management practices, internal corruption and financial mismanagement, and that, although its larger audience share makes the public radio a genuine alternative to commercial stations, it shows a notable absence of bold, critical journalism directed at the political and economic powers because of a historically embedded obedience within the institution. In March 2025 the editor-in-chief of Radio România Iași, Nicolae Tomescu, questioned on the station’s Facebook page the decision barring Călin Georgescu from the presidential election; journalists at the station demanded his resignation and that of the station’s manager, and SRR said it had ordered a prompt analysis of the situation and distanced itself from any breach of professional ethics and legal norms. In May 2025 the MediaSind union at Radio România demanded Dincă’s resignation and the removal of what it called political sinecures.

The MJRC and IPI’s 2026 report finds that the boards and heads of the public broadcasters are still appointed by parliamentary majorities along party lines, resulting in political influence and a lack of independence, and that the interim heads installed in September 2026 were chosen by Parliament’s leadership with the votes of PSD and AUR. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) states that media independence suffers from attempts at political interference, especially in the appointment of the heads of public radio and television.

SRR’s stations together had a 23.3 per cent share of the national radio market in the audience survey conducted between 27 April and 16 August 2026, and Radio România Actualități, with 11.2 per cent, ranked second nationally by share.

AI and digital policy

No standalone SRR editorial policy on artificial intelligence (AI) was identified for this update. SRR’s privacy policy states that it uses only technical AI tools, for transcription, automated translation and subtitling, that personal data are not entered into public models or used to train algorithms, and that any content generated substantially by AI is visibly labelled. In 2023 Radio Romania International began using synthetic voices for the opening, closing and station announcements of its English-language broadcasts, and in 2024 Radio Antena Satelor started a pilot project using AI to transcribe interviews, translate material into minority languages and generate content for online platforms. The Audiovisual Code of the National Audiovisual Council (CNA), in force since 7 August 2025, applies to radio as well as television programmes. Its Article 101 requires realistic synthetic content, including audio content, to carry, throughout its broadcast, the written warning “Audiovisual content made with the help of artificial intelligence!” without specifying how the requirement applies to radio-only transmission, and the cases in which the CNA has cited it concern television advertising spots. The Government approved a national AI strategy for 2024 to 2027 in July 2024.

Classification rational

SRR retains the State-Controlled (SC) classification in 2026. Its leadership continues to be allotted among the parliamentary parties: the board appointed in November 2025 was shared out under a coalition arrangement that gave the public radio’s leadership to USR, and its interim head since September 2026 was proposed by PSD and appointed by Parliament’s leadership with the votes of PSD and AUR. It depends on annual state budget allocations for almost all of its revenue. The MJRC and IPI find that the boards and heads of the public broadcasters are still appointed by parliamentary majorities along party lines, resulting in political influence and a lack of independence, and their 2024 finding of a historically embedded obedience within the public radio points to editorial deference to those in power. No documented case of direct state instruction over SRR’s output was identified for 2025 and 2026, and SRR’s coverage under its interim management warrants continued review.

October 2026