The media industry has been ravaged by the economic crises. Some media, mainly those covering tabloid fare and digitally savvier than others or those backed by deep-pocketed investors, are surviving or even thriving. But independent journalism outfits, particularly outside the Western world, have been grappling with serious financial problems. This article is an analysis of how government uses funding, directly and indirectly, to capture the media. It describes trends in how governments use funding to control media by not financing independent journalism, but choosing to fund instead media outlets that advance the government agenda and the interests of its allies and supporters, either political groups or businesses.

Public service media (PSM) are widely acknowledged as part of the variety of solutions to disinformation. The remit of PSM, formed around values of universality, equality, diversity, accuracy and quality, implies a responsibility to fight disinformation by producing fact-based news content and finding anti-disinformation solutions. In this article, we introduce a framework for assessing how PSM organizations are able to counter disinformation in different contexts. Our normative framework provides a triangulation of contextual factors that determine the role of the PSM organization in the national environment, the activities carried out to fight disinformation and expert assessments of the potential of PSM to reduce the impact of disinformation. The framework is illustrated with analyses of PSM from the Czech Republic (CZE), Finland, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK).

Media capture, a situation in which the media can no longer function independently but is controlled by vested interests, has been researched as a concept and empirical phenomenon in a variety of contexts. The capture of Public Service Media has received less scrutiny, even though media organizations with a public service mandate are facing increased pressures from governments and commercial competitors alike. This chapter proposes a framework for assessing the impact of media capture on Public Service Media organizations in different national contexts. It highlights the importance of both media systems and public discourses in understanding the forms in which Public Service Media capture can emerge and become manifest.

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In a converged media system where the public is more than ever in control of what, when and where to consume content, public service media must put citizen participation at the heart of their strategies. That means giving the audiences more control over funding of public media, increased participation of civil society in the governance of these media outlets and more meaningful involvement of citizens in their content production process. This paper summarizes recent trends in how media companies in general engage with their audiences in the digital economy and explores opportunities and models of citizen participation in the public media of the future. The paper argues that without adjusting to the realities of the digital economy, which would mean first and foremost building audience centric networked platforms of content distribution, public service media will have a hard time to attract new followers, especially among younger audiences, and risk alienating their already declining audiences. In a media ecosystem populated by a growing number of content producers that are all fiercely competing to capture people’s attention, public service media can gain a competitive edge only if they engage citizens in innovative, meaningful ways. Without the citizen participation element, they risk becoming a marginal player or, worse, a thing of the past.