RTS Programming Council Tender Seven Months Overdue

RTS’s Programming Council has not had a single member with a valid mandate since mid June, and the parliamentary Committee on Culture and Information still had not announced a tender for a new council by August 5, when the Journalists’ Association of Serbia published an overview of missed deadlines at both public broadcasters. Members of that body were elected on June 21, 2022, for a four year term.

The same body at Radio Television of Vojvodina lost its mandate even earlier, on December 14, 2025. The Law on Public Media Services requires the competent parliamentary committee to announce a public tender for programming council members six months before the current council’s mandate expires. For RTS, that committee is the Assembly’s Committee on Culture and Information, and for RTV it is the committee of the Assembly of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina.

“The programming councils of RTS and RTV have not been reconstituted after their members’ mandates expired,” the Journalists’ Association of Serbia said in a statement.

The legal deadline sets up a simple calculation. The tender for the RTS Programming Council should have been announced by December 21, 2025 at the latest, so the delay now stands at seven and a half months and is still running. For RTV the deadline was June 14, 2025, and the tender was published on June 24 this year, more than a year late and only after the outgoing council had already lost its mandate.

We reported earlier that the assembly committee had not started the process, when the missing tender could still be explained by the session calendar. Since then it has become clear that this is not a single missed deadline but a pattern spanning both public broadcasters and two different levels of government. The association sent the committee questions asking why the tender was not announced within the legal deadline and when it is expected, but no answer had arrived two days later.

What cannot be elected while there is no council

Amendments to the Law on Public Media Services adopted in 2025 introduced an obligation for RTS and RTV to have a commissioner for the protection of the rights of listeners, viewers and readers. The commissioner is elected by the programming council, through a public tender.

Since there is no council, there is no body to run that tender either. The position, meant as a link between the audience and the editorial staff, has stayed empty, and the duties it is supposed to carry out by law, monitoring professional and ethical standards and protecting citizens’ interests related to the public service’s programming role, have no one in charge of them. It is a consequence that does not fix itself: until the assembly committee announces the first tender, the second cannot even begin.

Managing boards caught in the same gap

The staffing vacuum has not stopped at the programming councils. Most members of the RTV Managing Board saw their mandates expire on July 13 this year, leaving the board with four of its nine members. The RTS Managing Board, for the same reason, lost two thirds of its composition and is down to three members out of nine.

The tender for managing board members is announced by the Council of the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Media, and that council has not been constituted yet. Because of that, the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications, at RTS’s request, issued an opinion stating that the legally sound interpretation is one under which managing board members keep working until new members are appointed and take office. The opinion was signed by Minister Boris Bratina, on July 13, the very day the mandate expired.

Whether the managing boards actually kept working, and whether the public broadcasters accepted that opinion, the public has not learned so far. The only date known in advance in this whole chronology is the one that has already passed, and the next step depends on a committee session that has not yet been scheduled.