United States: Continued Weak Funding for Public Service Media

Journalism under (ideological) threat: Safeguarding and enhancing public service media into the 21st century

“…In the United States, where public funding in broadcasting has historically been very low, the terms of the debate have recently focussed on the government eliminating federal spending. Among other factors, this is driven by an ideological resistance to public media, which is widely seen as liberal and left-wing by many Republican or independent politicians and political parties (Powers, 2018). More generally, as right-wing parties and populist politicians have grown in size and influence, many public service broadcasters – notably in Europe – have had their journalistic independence more vociferously attacked.…”

Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries

“…The bias toward stronger democracies is intended to exclude, to the largest possible extent, public media that primarily are organs of government communication, often referred to as “state-administered” media (Bermejo et al 2014). Our criteria for selecting a country's public media for analysis are (1) strength of democracy: the country must be ranked as a “full” or “flawed” democracy in the EIU's 2019 Democracy Index; (2) geographic spread: up to four of the highest-ranked countries selected per region, except Western Europe, where we include the U.K. as a fifth country due to the strength of the BBC as an exemplar of public media systems, and Asia and Australasia, where we include Taiwan and India as fifth and sixth countries due to the vast geographic and geopolitical sweep of this region and due to India's large international footprint in terms of population and economy; (3) indication that quality data is available: the country must be included among prior public media research produced by Benson et al (2017), Benson and Powers (2011), Bermejo et al (2014), or the Public Media Alliance (Warner 2019). 4…”

“…Excluding these three countries from our analysis increases positive, though still weak (>0.2) correlations between proportion of public versus private funding and most of EIU's democracy indices, with the exception of political culture (0.186). In addition, we do not directly measure how public funding enables public media to maintain a focus on public service rather than on competing for audiences in a marketplace increasingly dominated by global media players (Warner 2019). 14 More research is needed to flesh out relationships between mixes of public and non-public funding and the health of public media and their democracies.…”

“…Funding mechanisms, typically specified in laws establishing public media as independent institutions, also are important regulatory frameworks. Secure streams of multiyear funding, rather than annual appropriations, enhance public media systems’ independence, enabling them to strategically plan for future years without being compelled to plead their cases for funding each year in processes that can be highly politicized (Benson et al 2017; Warner 2019). Direct funding linkages to the public through license fees or equivalent taxes also have been shown to enhance the independence of public media (Klimkiewicz 2015).…”