Bulgarian Service
Svobodna Evropa provides independent reporting in Bulgaria against the backdrop of a media landscape weakened by monopolistic ownership and corruption.
Website page views
(2024)
Facebook video views
(2024)
Instagram video views
(2024)
YouTube video views
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About the Service
Originally operating between 1950 and 2004, Svobodna Evropa relaunched in 2019 in response to declining media independence in Bulgaria.
Svobodna Evropa operates digitally from Sofia via its website, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Viber – covering Russian influence in Bulgaria, public corruption, and human rights abuses.
Journalists investigated a pro-Russian cash-for-disinformation network spreading misleading stories, disinformation, and propaganda in Bulgaria.
Svobodna Evropa reporting revealed the secret luxury homes of a powerful Hungarian oligarch and politician sanctioned by the U.S. for corruption.
The Service covered local reactions to a controversial anti-LGBT law passed by Bulgaria’s parliament in August 2024.
Reaching Audiences
Media Climate
Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index ranks Bulgaria 59th out of 180 countries.
RFE/RL and its journalists are frequently attacked in media controlled by the political and business elite.
Latest Updates
RFE/RL President Jamie Fly Visits Bulgaria
During a visit to Bulgaria this week, RFE/RL President & CEO Jamie Fly met with Bulgarian President Rumen Radev and Prime Minister Kiril Petkov.
Radio Free Europe’s Audience Reach Behind the Iron Curtain
The data graphics below demonstrate Radio Free Europe’s weekly audience reach from 1963 to 1989 in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Audience reach for other foreign broadcasters is shown.
Remembering RFE/RL’s Fallen Journalists
RFE/RL journalists, often at great personal risk, work to spread knowledge and combat lies to ensure that people even in the world’s most oppressed nations have access to the truth.
Service Director
Ivan Bedrov
Ivan Bedrov is the Service Director of RFE/RL’s Bulgarian Service, known locally as Svobodna Evropa, which was relaunched in January 2019. Over the course of a 30 -year-long career in Bulgarian media, Bedrov has worked as a radio reporter for RFE/RL’s Bulgarian Service in the late 1990s, and as a current affairs program producer and host for the country’s first private national TV station, bTV. In 2014, he was made Deputy Editor –in Chief of the leading news and analytical website ClubZ.bg. He has also worked as a political commentator for the international broadcaster Deutsche Welle. Bedrov was a member of the Bulgarian Commission for Journalism Ethics and has won several journalism awards.
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