Czech Television and Czech Radio Strike for a Day as Babiš Moves Public Media Onto the State Budget
At midnight on November 3 2026, Czech Television’s news chief Michal Kubal went on air to say that an unprecedented day in the history of Czech public service media had begun. Staff at Czech Television and Czech Radio then stopped work for 24 hours. The walkout was aimed squarely at a government bill.
The bill comes from Prime Minister Andrej Babiš’s coalition. It would scrap the licence fee that households and businesses pay for the two broadcasters and fund them straight from the state budget instead. Babiš says that’s a campaign promise kept and that the Czech Republic would simply join the 17 other EU countries that fund public media this way. The staff, the opposition, the Senate and a long list of press freedom groups say it hands the government a lever over the newsroom every time it writes a budget.
What viewers and listeners got that day
The strike was visible by design. ČT24, the news channel, cut to short hourly bulletins and filled the rest with archive programmes. Czech Radio played music through the morning, broken by a short statement on the reasons for the strike and a minute of silence. Regional radio stations carried one shared programme from the Karlín studios in Prague. Basic news and traffic updates kept running, and the children’s channels were left alone.
In the afternoon, staff marched from both headquarters, the radio from Vinohradská street and the television from the Kavčí hory complex several kilometres away, to Wenceslas Square. Thousands joined them there and in other cities. More than 30 European and international organisations, among them Reporters Without Borders and the European Broadcasting Union, had backed the walkout in advance.
The money and the vote
The bill moved fast. The coalition put it on the Chamber of Deputies agenda on a Friday morning and pushed it through first reading at 4:36 am on Saturday October 24, while protesters stood outside parliament. That vote didn’t pass the law. It only stopped the opposition from killing it at the first hurdle. The bill now sits with the chamber’s media and culture committee, and a coalition minister, Boris Šťastný, has said the next reading could come in January. The fees have not been abolished yet.
The numbers are what worry the broadcasters most. Reuters reported the change would cut their funding by about 15 percent from next year, which would take Czech Television’s nominal budget back to its 2008 level and Czech Radio’s to 2005. OCCRP reports the bill would put Czech Television on a fixed state allocation of 5.74 billion crowns and Czech Radio on 2.06 billion. Czech Television’s director general, Hynek Chudárek, has warned that less money means fewer services, and local reporters fear the regional newsrooms will be the first to go.
Public opinion leans the broadcasters’ way. A STEM/MARK survey for Czech Television found 68 percent of Czechs want public service media kept well away from both state control and private ownership. The Senate has already come out against the plan, and the opposition says it will take the law to the Constitutional Court if it passes.
Why reporters outside Prague should watch this
Funding public broadcasters from the state budget is not unusual in itself, and Babiš’s point about other EU countries is fair as far as it goes. The difference is in the safeguards. Press freedom groups argued back in April that this bill weakens the guarantees of financial independence that the European Media Freedom Act now requires, and that it does so while cutting the budget at the same time. A broadcaster whose budget is set each year by the government it covers has a reason to think twice before the next hard story.
The Czech fight also fits a pattern in central Europe, from Hungary under Orbán to Slovakia’s 2024 overhaul of its public broadcaster, of governments reshaping public media through funding and governance rather than open censorship. For background on the government behind the bill, see Policymaker.net on Czech politics after the October 2026 elections.
The next test is the committee stage. The strike made the cost of the bill visible for one day. The vote will decide whether it lasts.