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Czech Radio will be at the center of a series of commemorative events marking 50 years since the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Czech Radio is cooperating closely with the National Museum, the National Film Archive and the Institute for Study of Totalitarian Regimes to produce a video-mapping of the August events, including a 13-hour special starting late on August 20th which will follow the events of that night and the early hours of August 21st when Russian tanks rolled into the country to crush the democratic reforms of the Prague Spring movement.

Thirty Czech Radio reporters will be stationed at crucial sites around the country to recall the events of that dark chapter in the country’s history.

Czech Radio denies any wrongdoing after a listener complained about hearing “pornography” on its Vltava station. The listener called on Facebook for control bodies to investigate how she and her children had come to hear references to the male member in a Saturday morning broadcast.

A member of the Czech Radio Council said the head of Vltava would be called to explain the broadcast, Czech Television reported.

For their part, Vltava said the text was not lewd but had come from The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, a book which had received the prestigious Man Booker Prize.

In the early years of Radio Free Europe, the U.S. station – although initially founded and largely secretly funded by the CIA – played a critical role in providing balanced, objective news to listeners in the Eastern Bloc, especially during turbulent periods of history. Having failed to live up its own standards when covering the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, RFE took a radically different approach to its coverage of the Prague Spring and Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, says former RFE director A. Ross Johnson.

A government VAT bill will lead to Czech Television and Czech Radio losing a significant chunk of their annual budgets. However, the Ministry of Finance says the amendment will end a discrepancy between Czech law and European Union legislation.

Czech Radio has managed to save material from recently discovered audio reels of one of the Czechoslovak Communist era’s biggest show trials – that of top party leader Rudolf Slánský and 13 co-accused. The salvaged sound has now been made public.

Czech Radio is celebrating its 95th anniversary this year. The Czech national radio broadcaster has come a long way since its pioneering days. Today it is the biggest radio broadcaster in the country with 9 channels, manned not only by its Prague staff but 14 regional branches providing news and reports from around the country. The station’s buildings are also an important part of its history. On the occasion of Czech Radio’s 95th anniversary we have prepared a photo gallery of its buildings, some of them valuable architectural landmarks.

Czech Radio is on Friday marking the 95th anniversary of the station’s first ever broadcast from a military airfield in Prague. The public will be able to join in celebrations the following day in the form of an open day and a free concert at a nearby park.

Many people don’t know that the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra is one of the oldest leading Czech orchestras. It was founded only three years after the creation of Czech Radio in 1923 and it is currently celebrating its 91st season. I talked to Jakub Čížek, the Director of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra about their ongoing season and began by asking him about the orchestra’s mission.

From Wednesday Czech Radio is available on Alexa, a voice-activated smart device of the kind that may be seen in most homes in the future. To get Radio Prague’s news, for instance, all you need to do is issue a command and the headlines are playing a few second later. I discussed Alexa – which resembles a small round speaker – with Czech Radio new media specialist Adam Javůrek.

Czech politicians have sharply rejected the idea that the country’s public broadcasters –Czech Radio and Czech Television – should be nationalized. The suggestion was made by the head of the Party of Freedom and Direct Democracy Tomio Okamura in an interview for Czech Radio, when he claimed that the financing of the two institutions was intransparent and they should be under national supervision. He said his party was in favour of scrapping license fees and making the public broadcasters entirely dependent on state support.

Politicians from the ANO party, the Pirates party, the Christian Democrats, TOP 09 and the Mayors and Independents slammed the idea saying they would never support censorship or take any measure that would undermined the independence of the country’s public broadcasters.

The head of Czech Radio Rene Zavoral said Czech Radio regularly presents reports on spending to the lower house of Parliament and argued that nationalizing the public broadcaster would be in violation of the basic principles of democracy.