The Chairwoman of the Council for Electronic Media (CEM) Simona Veleva presented to the parliamentary media committee the position of CEM regarding the draft budget for 2026 in the field of the media regulator. The council insists on a 10% salary increase in the state-owned BNT and BNR.
"In terms of the budget, the increase that is planned for us is only a 5% increase in the salaries of employees, who currently have only 53 out of 61 full-time positions. We support and support the 10% increase in the salaries of employees of the Bulgarian National Television and the Bulgarian National Radio. Budgets that we have coordinated, because this is part of the coordination procedure under the Radio and Television Act. We support the increase in the salaries of BTA employees and make a request, if possible and there is such a will", said Veleva.
„The Council has justified the need for additional financing of its various activities in the amount of 1,286,747 leva, which we, of course, support, but we clearly understand the realities and the needs for financing various spheres of public life. We have increased the average salary of employees, which again, although small, is already in the amount of over 2,100 leva", said Veleva, quoted by BTA.
„We have renovated the regional centers of CEM – something that had not happened since 2006, by completely revitalizing our regional center in Varna, where we hired new employees to support the huge activity of CEM in monitoring audiovisual media content, non-linear and video sharing platforms. We watch more than 18,000 hours of audiovisual content per year, we listen to more than 7,000 hours of radio content. The need to renew these regional centers, after almost 20 years, was indeed welcome. We have renovated Veliko Tarnovo, Varna and Plovdiv, and we are about to renovate Burgas, Blagoevgrad and Vidin, which is an important step for CEM", said Simona Veleva.
„It is no less important that this viewing and listening by hand in today's 21st century is extremely labor-intensive, so CEM has taken steps to update the monitoring system and implement artificial intelligence, so that the majority of the content can be downloaded from speech to text and can be processed with a large language model, which the council is about to purchase, upgrade and create", said Simona Veleva.
„Last but not least, we have completely digitized our document circulation and our electronic system, so that more than 99% of the document circulation is currently entirely electronic, thus there is complete transparency regarding the council's activities and its functionalities", said Veleva.
„We are talking about only 81 thousand euros, which against the background of the multi-million budget is indeed a symbolic amount, but it is necessary to optimize the remuneration of our employees from 5% to 10%, so that there can be equal treatment between media workers in the CEM, who ultimately supervise the public media and all other private media. And this is a principle and approach for non-discrimination and equal treatment, because these employees have been working in these institutions for more than 20 years, regardless of the fact that we are changing. When it is seen that those working in the Bulgarian National Radio and the Bulgarian National Television receive an increase of 10%, for only 53 CEM employees this remains within 5%, natural tensions are created, which can be overcome very easily and with will and such a request on our part," said Simona Veleva.