The Second Priebe Report, that is, the “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia: Assessment and recommendations of the Senior Experts’ Group on systemic Rule of Law Issues 2017”, published in September 2017, places the public broadcasting service and the process of securing its financial and editorial independence, in the very centre of the the future media reforms in the country.

The Media Development Centre has long advocated the overcoming of a problem that we never, in the past almost three decades of independence, attempted to eliminate. That is the need, when discussion the reform of the public broadcasting service, the Macedonian Radio and Television (MRT), of implementing a true and comprehensive public debate and discussion that will involve all social groups and interests, the expert and academic community and the citizens in general. That discussion needs to help with the mapping of the needs that MRT has to satisfy through its programmes and other services it offers.

At the same time, the efforts to reform MRT will surely be influenced by the contermporary trends in public broadcasting and broadcasting in general. The most important of those trends is the digitalization, process that assumes that MRT will sooner rather than later be transformed from a public broadcasting service into a public media service.

In this document, its author Klime Babunski identifies the problems that never allowed MRT to grow into a true public broadcasting service and that we need to overcome, as well as the necessary directions that we need to take to achieve that goal, that is, to turn MRT into a public broadcasting service and later, in accordance with contemporary trends, into a public media service.

The document is attached, as printable PDF document, and is available at the following link Future of nonexistent present

<i>This document was prepared with support by the Civica Mobilitas programme of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). The contents of this publication is the sole responsibility of the Media Development Centre and shall be not understood, in any way or fashion, to be representative of the views of Civica Mobilitas, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) or the organisations that implement the programme.</i>