The story
Founded by Government of Spain on Jan 12, 1946, in Madrid.1
Precedents
Spanish state-wide public broadcasting services have undergone numerous restructurings and reorganisations throughout its history, and have assumed several identities. Their history may be traced back to the first radio broadcasts of Radio Nacional de España (RNE) from Salamanca, developed as a propaganda tool for the Rebel faction during the Spanish Civil War. RNE was founded on 19 January 1937 and was subservient to the State Delegation for Press and Propaganda led by Vicente Gay Forner.
Throughout the Francoist dictatorship, the national radio service depended successively on the FET y de las JONS's Vice-Secretariat for Popular Education (VSEP), on the Ministry of National Education (since 1945) and on the Ministry of Information and Tourism, since the creation of the latter in 1951. In July 1945, in the wake of the transfer of responsibilities over Press and Propaganda to the Ministry of National Education, radio broadcasting became a standalone directorate general: the Dirección General de Radiodifusión ('Directorate General for Radio Broadcasting').
After some time on trial, the first regular Televisión Española (TVE) signal was broadcast on 28 October 1956 from the Paseo de la Habana in Madrid, reaching the roughly 600 television receivers existing in the city at the time. On 11 October 1973, the two networks for respectively radio and television broadcasting, RNE and TVE, were consolidated into the Servicio Público Centralizado Radiotelevisión Española ('RTVE Centralised Public Service'). Up until the 1980s, with the creation of regional broadcasters ETB and TV3, TVE held the monopoly on television broadcasting in the country.
Further consolidations followed in 1977, at which time RTVE became an organismo autónomo. In 1979, TVE and RNE were joined by Radiocadena Española (RCE), an old radio service that, unlike RNE, could broadcast commercials. Under the purview of the 1980 Statute of the Radio and Television, the public broadcasting services were configured as a legal public entity (ente público) with its own jurisdiction, the Ente Público Radiotelevisión Española.
The former cinema newsreels service NO-DO was merged into RTVE to be dismantled in 1981. Since then, the NO-DO archives are property of RTVE and its conservation is in their hands and Filmoteca Española's. In 1989, RCE was dismantled and its radio service was merged into RNE.
RTVE Corporation
In accordance with the Law of State Radio and Television of 5 June 2006, and in the face of an enormous deficit, the RTVE Public Body and the companies TVE, S.A. and RNE, S.A. were dissolved, and on 1 January 2007, Corporación RTVE came into existence. RTVE was thus constituted as a fully autonomous sociedad mercantil estatal, assuming the corporate form of a sociedad anónima fully participated by the State. For the first time, the chair of the public broadcasting services was appointed by the Cortes Generales (the legislative) rather than by the Government of Spain (the executive), as it had been previously the case with the directors-general of the ente público and the servicio público de radiodifusión.
As part of the 2007 restructuring, a controversial plan was implemented to reduce the workforce by 4,855 through attrition and retirement incentives.
In 2012 political tensions associated with the austerity policies enacted by the ruling right-leaning People's Party (PP) resulted in departures of personnel, which were interpreted by interviewed journalists as an effort to purge critical political comment from RTVE's content. In 2012 the PP began staffing RTVE with party veterans. Considerable controversy was caused when Ana Pastor was fired.
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On 11 June 2013, RTVE was one of the few known European broadcasters to condemn and criticize the closure of Greece's state broadcaster ERT.
In December 2018, RTVE launched a web with Filmoteca Española, which is available via Internet with more than 4000 videos of Spanish films and documentaries.
Amid the inability to reach a parliamentary agreement for the renovation of the administration board of RTVE, Rosa María Mateo was appointed as Provisional Sole Administrator in July 2018. In February 2021, the renovation was unblocked and José Manuel Pérez Tornero was shortlisted as the future chairman of the corporation. Thus, the new board was constituted on 26 March 2021.
In October 2021, the corporation's decision to deny a travel of a group of RTVE journalists to Tindouf to attend an event organised by the Polisario Front and thus be presumably able to interview Brahim Ghali stirred controversy and led to the renunciation of both TVE and RNE heads of the international informative services.
RTVE did not participate or broadcast the Eurovision Song Contest 2026, after 65 years of uninterrupted Spanish participation, because the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation was allowed to participate despite the behavior of its delegation and the interference of the Israeli government in the preceding contests, and the Israeli offensive in the Gaza war.
From Wikipedia’s article on RTVE, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4