LRT’s commercial competitors, have cried “unfair” in a formal complaint asking for a European Union order to curb the public broadcaster’s state-financed budget and online news operation, niemanreports.org writes.

Their complaint argues that the Covid pandemic has firmly underscored the need for change. Ad revenue losses of 50% or more, due to Covid economics, forced many commercial newsrooms to furlough journalists or use pay cuts or layoffs to stay afloat in 2020.

While those newsrooms tightened belts, the pandemic’s financial turmoil didn’t touch LRT or its three TV channels, three radio stations, and online news sites in Lithuanian, Russian, and English. LRT is funded by fixed percentages of personal income and excise tax revenues, a formula designed by lawmakers to provide stable annual budgets shielded from political influence. For several years, the formula has translated into ever more-generous (and pandemic-proof) annual budgets: an 11% increase in 2020 was followed by another rise of 15%, totaling around $64 million, to fund LRT this year.

“They did not have to think how to survive [the pandemic] and how, for example, to cut the wages of journalists,” says Džina Donauskaitė, director of the nonprofit Lithuanian Journalism Centre, which works with both public and private media. Instead, LRT could create new pandemic-era programming, such as educational shows for children in virus lockdown and Sunday worship services on TV, after Covid forced church closures in the very Catholic country. This year’s budget increase will help LRT open a bureau in Brussels to cover the EU, a rare foreign venture for Lithuanian media.

LRT “is having something of a golden moment” says Ruslanas Irzikevicius, who edits the English version of 15min, Lithuania’s second most widely read news portal. The public broadcaster’s director general, Monika Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė, who came to LRT after years as editor of Lithuania’s number one portal, Delfi, “has done a fantastic job with online,” Irzikevicius notes. “Overall, maybe she’s doing too good a job,” he says. “There has to be some kind of balance.”

Three years ago, Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė moved from commercial media to LRT. As leader of the public broadcaster, she moved swiftly to create an investigative reporting desk and to fend off political challenges to LRT’s independence. (A new management board proposed by populist government leaders in 2019 was not approved, nor did the same politicians succeed with a court challenge to LRT’s funding.)

Even commercial media critics say LRT’s journalism has remained strong under Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė, who has used her budget and staff – the largest in Lithuanian media — to mount ambitious coverage of major events, such as national elections and Pope Francis’s 2018 visit to Lithuania.
But commercial rivals balked when that budget enabled LRT to win air rights for this season’s Euroleague basketball games. In the past, the games aired behind a paywall on commercial TV3; LRT is now showing many of them for free (but selling sponsorships, similar to PBS underwriting, which further incensed commercial rivals).

“We live in the 21st century, and there are no more boundaries between different media platforms,” she said in an early interview with her old employer, Verslo žinios. “Content must reach the user through the most convenient channels.”

At the time, LRT’s online presence barely registered in audience surveys. Three years on, it now regularly ranks as Lithuania’s fifth-most visited news portal – thanks to more frequent news updates, mobile push notifications, and new, digital-only content, like a documentary series that has tackled sensitive topics such as gay parenting and abortion.

Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė sees these changes as essential, if LRT is to be relevant for younger audiences, whose preferred platforms are online and mobile. During an interview on Zoom, she holds up her cell phone to the computer camera. “The world is going in a different direction, and everything is here,” she says. “Your news is here.”

The fight between LRT and commercial rivals makes Lithuania’s news community uncomfortable, not least because it sometimes resembles a battle of personalities more than policy – “a catfight,” as one journalist described it.

Several journalists said they wished commercial media and LRT could have found a way to discuss their differences without the formal complaint to the EC. “Our fight with the national broadcaster is really bad for our image, for all journalism,” Delfi CEO Benokraitis acknowledges.

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