Adrian Sârbu (born 18 April 1955) is a Romanian media executive, businessman, film director and producer. He founded the Media Pro group, the Mediafax news agency, the radio station Pro FM and Pro TV, still the biggest television station in Romania, along with its sister channels Acasă and Pro Cinema, the newspapers ProSport and Ziarul Financiar, the MediaPro studios at Buftea, the production company MediaPro Pictures and the media school run by his Fundația Pro. A large part of the people working in Romanian television passed through Pro TV, which the sociologist Alfred Bulai has called a school of television. Business rankings put him among the richest media owners in the country. Ronald Lauder's Central European Media Enterprises (CME) had been his partner in Pro TV since 1995. He sold it his television and production companies, and from 2009 to 2013 he ran the Nasdaq-listed group as its president and chief executive. The Romanian press called it the highest executive job a Romanian had ever held in an American multinational. He left CME in 2013 and in 2020 started , the news channel he still leads.
Early life and film career Sârbu was born on 18 April 1955 in Brașov. He studied film directing at the Institute of Theatre and Film Arts (IATC) in Bucharest. In 1980 he worked as assistant director to Andrei Blaier on the television series Lumini și umbre, according to the cinematographer Alexandru Doru Spătaru, who was an assistant cameraman on the same production.
He was then hired by the Alexandru Sahia studio, the state documentary studio in Bucharest, as part of a group of young directors who joined it at the start of the 1980s. Adevărul has written that he made more than 150 documentaries there. The best known of them is Aflați despre mine că sunt bine, sănătos, ceea ce vă doresc la fel... (1982), a 17-minute colour film written by Mircea Bunescu and initially titled Căminiștii. Shot in workers' hostels, it follows young people brought from the countryside to work in Bucharest industry and the loss of bearings that came with the move. The film was included on the first Sahia Vintage DVD published by the One World Romania association, and the critic Andrei Gorzo described it as remarkably consistent in the melancholy with which it looks at these lives, with heavily staged camera movements by Sârbu and his cinematographer Mircea Bunescu. It has since been shown in archive programmes on housing in socialist Bucharest, and in 2026 it was screened at the One World Romania festival, under the English title I For One Am Alive and Well..., alongside a short by Jiří Menzel. Forbes România noted in 2017 that this period is one that former media figures who worked in the state audiovisual sector tend to leave out of their biographies.
The 1989 revolution and politics On 22 December 1989 Sârbu was inside the building of the Communist Party Central Committee, where he filmed the meetings that produced the new leadership. According to Adevărul, participants in the revolution described him as close to Silviu Brucan, who brought him into the building, and he made his first money selling the footage to foreign television networks. In 2014 he released a previously unseen recording of the constitution of the Council of the National Salvation Front on 22 December 1989.
After the revolution he became a member of the National Salvation Front Council, the provisional governing body, as secretary of state for the press. In Petre Roman's government he held the same rank and was responsible for the executive's communication and image. Prosecutors in the Mineriad case later described him as the prime minister's chief of staff and adviser. World Screen wrote that in this role he promoted the country's first audiovisual law, which opened the way to privately owned television. He left politics after the events of 13 to 15 June 1990 in Bucharest, known as the Mineriad, although Adevărul noted that he remained close to people in power.
Media Pro and Pro TV Building the group Sârbu founded Media Pro on his own in September 1990, four years before Ronald Lauder became involved. In 1991 Media Pro launched Mediafax, the first independent news agency in post-communist Romania. Mihnea Vasiliu, who joined it as a reporter that autumn and later ran Publimedia and Mediafax, remembered a company of 30 people in which the owner sat next to his staff. The radio station Pro FM followed in 1993, and the same year Sârbu obtained a licence for a sports channel, Canal 31, and put it on air in Bucharest with a team drawn in part from the private stations SOTI and Amerom. By the spring of 1995 Media Pro, which Bermuda's Royal Gazette described as the largest Romanian media group, held several regional television licences and four radio stations.
Canal 31 was already broadcasting when Sârbu met Lauder in 1994. He later said that Lauder, whom he had won over in a fifteen-minute presentation, had been the only one to give him a hand, and that this had allowed him to relaunch the channel. Adevărul put the investment at $20 million. In April 1995 Media Pro and CME, the company Lauder had set up to build commercial television in the former Eastern Bloc, formed Media Pro International with the aim of winning a licence for a national commercial network; Ion Țiriac was Sârbu's partner in the television venture. Pro TV went on air on 1 December 1995, replacing Canal 31, with Sârbu as general director and president of its board, posts he held until 2009. Within a year Pro TV reached 55 percent of the population and took about 40 percent of television advertising revenue. By 1996 CME owned 77.5 percent of Media Pro International, with Sârbu and Țiriac holding the rest and most of the licence company Pro TV SRL. A second channel, Acasă, was launched in February 1998 and was followed by Pro TV Internațional in 2000, Pro Cinema in 2004 and, in 2007, Sport.ro and the Romanian licence of MTV.
Pro TV took over the market fast. In January 1997, little more than a year after the launch, The Christian Science Monitor reported that the station already dominated the ratings in Bucharest and other cities and had taken the lion's share of viewers and advertising revenue from the state broadcaster TVR. Rather than hiring from state television, it had recruited young print journalists and film school graduates and sent them to CNN and the BBC for training, and most observers quoted by the newspaper credited it with starting a revolution in news reporting.
Then came the elections of 1996, in which Emil Constantinescu and the Romanian Democratic Convention beat Ion Iliescu, and Pro TV's part in the result has been discussed ever since. During the campaign Pro TV ran a large drive to bring voters to the polls under the slogan "Votezi și câștigi" ("You vote and you win"), built around Pro TV postcards that became so sought after that, according to the media analyst Iulian Comănescu, who worked at the station at the time, they were sold under the counter at post offices. The station also reported live from polling stations across the country. The Christian Science Monitor reported that many credited the station's news coverage with helping to topple Iliescu's government, quoted the sociologist Gabriel Andreescu as saying that Pro TV had been "essential to the political changes" and noted that pollsters had found the areas won by the opposition closely matched its broadcast reach. The station's chief news editor, Lucian Mîndruță, told the newspaper that Pro TV had responded to a public demand for more open news rather than caused the result. Adevărul has written that the channel played a decisive part in the change of power, a role later acknowledged even by the losing side, and Comănescu has argued that the 1996 elections were won by Pro TV a year earlier, in the street, through the mass events the channel staged. Sârbu himself said in 2025 that Pro TV had brought Constantinescu to power and that Constantinescu had acknowledged it.
After the elections the station threw itself into the campaign for NATO membership. Ahead of the 1997 Madrid summit it ran a "Pro NATO" campaign in which viewers deposited postcards in the courtyard of its headquarters for a prize of one billion lei, moved its news team to Madrid for the summit and, after Romania was left out of the first wave of enlargement, covered Bill Clinton's speech to the crowd in University Square on 11 July 1997. Sârbu has said that NATO membership became Pro TV's main objective after 1996 and that the station spent $2 million of its shareholder's money promoting Romania abroad, and he counts the country's admission to NATO in 2004 and to the European Union in 2007 among the outcomes to which Pro TV contributed. Adevărul has argued that after 2004 Sârbu kept the channel out of political games.
Television was only part of it. In 1996 Media Pro was a 30 percent partner in Mobil Rom, the consortium led by France Télécom that won one of Romania's first two GSM licences and launched the Dialog network in 1997, later rebranded Orange România. When France Télécom bought out the remaining minority shareholders in 2005, the sellers were financial investors led by the AIG New Europe Fund and Alcatel, funds that had come into the company in 1999. In 1998 Media Pro bought the state film studios at Buftea, which dated from the 1950s, and turned them into MediaPro Studios and the production company MediaPro Pictures. MediaPro Pictures produced, among other films, Cristian Nemescu's California Dreamin', which won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in 2007. In 2000 the group opened Hollywood Multiplex in Bucharest Mall, the first multiplex cinema in Romania. In 2006 it added a distribution arm, MediaPro Distribution, which released the group's own productions and other titles in Romanian cinemas and was among the companies sold to CME in 2009. Sârbu has also produced films himself: he was the producer of Jiří Menzel's The Don Juans (2013), made by Media Pro Pictures with TV Nova and submitted by the Czech Republic for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and of Cristina Jacob's Oh, Ramona! (2019).
Publishing was organised under PubliMedia International. The sports daily ProSport was launched in 1997, sold to the Swiss group Ringier in 2003 and bought back in 2008. On 16 November 1998 Sârbu launched Ziarul Financiar, a daily devoted to business and finance, at an event hosted by the National Bank of Romania. The paper outlasted almost everything else in the group and stayed identified with him long after the television and entertainment side had gone to CME. In May 2006 PubliMedia bought 60 percent of the company publishing Gândul, the daily founded a year earlier by Cristian Tudor Popescu and a group of journalists who had left Adevărul; at the time PubliMedia's portfolio included twelve magazines, among them Business Magazin, Pro TV Magazin and ProMotor, and seven regional newspapers. In May 2008 MediaPro Management bought 50.1 percent of the London-listed film distributor Metrodome Group from Germany's TV-Loonland, in a deal that valued Metrodome at about £3.2 million. Media Pro's combined sales for 2007 were put at €93 million.
Besides the commercial companies, Sârbu set up a charitable foundation, Fundația Pro, in 1997. It concentrated on education and in 1999 launched The Media University, a private school teaching journalism and other media disciplines. In 2007 Media Pro Pictures registered a Czech subsidiary in Prague, which took part in co-productions with Czech Television.
Selling to CME