Keeping Democracies Alive: The Role of Public Service Media

Abstract

Across the world, public service media faces a legion of simultaneous threats—to its funding, its distribution, its value and its independence. These threats come at a time when the fundamental purpose of public service media—to provide high quality, verified, and impartial news and information—could not be more consequential. As our digital spaces become epistemological junkyards, cluttered with bot-inflated, AI-generated text and clickbait content, so the public need for stable, grounded and verified media intensifies. In such a chaotic information environment, one might have expected that the UK government would enhance its commitment to public service media. Instead, successive UK governments have undermined its sustainability, reputation and future.