Bosnia and Herzegovina’s state broadcaster BHRT suspended its regular TV and radio programming on Thursday (26 February), warning that a deepening funding crisis could force the public service off air.
Viewers were met with a black screen carrying a message stating the outage was deliberate and intended as a warning about a potential shutdown.
BHRT was created after the 1990s war as a state-level broadcaster intended to serve audiences across the country’s divided political and ethnic landscape. A permanent closure would leave Bosnia as the only European country without a national public broadcaster, at a sensitive time as the country prepares for national elections in October.
Reuters reported that BHRT’s leadership has warned its accounts are effectively empty and that the broadcaster may be unable to plan or sustain operations without urgent financial relief.
The crisis has long roots in Bosnia’s fragmented public broadcasting funding model, under which licence-fee revenues collected in the country’s entities are meant to partially support BHRT. BHRT has said years of non-payment and political opposition to a single state broadcaster have pushed it towards collapse.
The European Broadcasting Union and other international bodies have previously warned that failure to secure BHRT’s future would be a major setback for public service media and democratic stability in the country.
