The Public Electronic Mass Media Council (SEPLP) on Thursday approved amendments to the Minorities Multimedia Platform Concept, obliging LTV7 public service TV channel to provide all content in the state language from January 1, 2025, SEPLP member Janis Eglitis informed on X.
Currently, programs aired on the LTV7 channel include content in Russian. LTV7’s only regular Russian-language program is LSM+News.
Last September, the Saeima approved a new National Security Concept. It stipulates that from January 1, 2026, content produced by public service media must be in Latvian and in languages belonging to the European cultural sphere. Opposition lawmakers previously criticized Culture Ministry officials from the Progressives party for what they saw as a willingness to refuse to comply with the parliament’s decisions.
In an interview with LETA, Culture Minister Agnese Lace (Progressives) said that Latvia’s public service media have a duty to reach out to the country’s ethnic minorities. She expressed the view that the media sector had long been left without a clear direction and without clear goals, except for a sentence included in the National Security Concept in the “last minute”.
According to Lace, the SEPLP has proposed a solution to implement the substance of the National Security Concept – to create a single information space, while also reaching out to the minorities living in the country. The new approach to addressing minorities in the public media should start working on January 1, 2026.
It will be a joint task of the SEPLP and the new Board of the unified public service broadcaster LSM to develop this approach, the culture minister says, adding that changes are already taking place, for example, Rus.lsm has been replaced with Lsm+, which aims to reach not only Latvia’s Russian speakers but other minorities as well.
Source: BNS
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