Public service media are in principle meant to serve the whole public. As the BBC’s mission states, the UK’s largest public service media organisation’s purpose is ‘to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain’.
Spotify | Apple | Google | Transcript
Public service media continue to face critical scrutiny and scepticism – whether from private sector competitors, some politicians, or parts of the public – and where they exist, they are also often by far the biggest direct government intervention in the media market. In the UK, for example, Ofcom estimates that publicly funded channels account for just over 10% of total television sector revenues, online audiovisual included (down from about 25% in 2013).1
Even where the public service mission is accompanied by significant public funding, however, reaching the whole public, and serving everybody, is a challenging remit. Our data can help shed light on one aspect of how this is going, by documenting how important citizens feel the news side is of what public service media do – (1) for them personally, and (2) for society. This is a significant aspect of the ‘public connection’ that these institutions are based on, and a key part of the political legitimacy they rely on. These are subjective judgements, and not an objective assessment of how well they are delivering on their remit, or how much public value they create, but still important to understand in their own right.
Does the public think public service news is important?
As part of this year’s Digital News Report, we have collected online survey data on these two questions from respondents in a subset of countries home to public service media that are generally seen as being relatively independent of government.
Across these countries, the balance of public opinion overall, between those who say that public service news services are very important or quite important minus those who find these services quite unimportant or very unimportant, is shown below. (The percentage who answered ‘neither important nor unimportant’ or ‘don’t know’ is reported next to the bar for each country.)
In about 80% of the countries covered, a majority of respondents say that public service media are important for society, and in all 19 countries, more people say important for society than unimportant. In more than half the countries, a majority of respondents say that public service media are important for them personally, and in 18 of the 19 countries, more people say important for them personally than unimportant (in Japan, the latter numbers are equal).
Respondents’ views on the importance of public service media news services for them personally, and for society, are strongly related. But notably, in almost every country covered, a significantly higher proportion say that public service media news services are ‘important for society’ than say they are important for them personally. It seems that the public value is often clearer than the private value – some people see public service media as something that is good for other people even if they aren’t necessarily personally all that reliant on them. But it is also clear that the number of people who believe public service media are important for others while not important for themselves is just a few percent.
Who considers public service media important?
The data we have collected also allow us to both look more closely at who considers public service media news important and to examine, considering a sample of different countries, the relations between people’s perception of the importance of public service and other factors, including (a) their experience of using public service news, (b) their social background or political orientation, or (c) their use of other sources of news.
Take using public service media first: all kinds of media content are what economists call ‘experience goods’, products where the value and quality can only be ascertained by actually using the good in question. This means that those who use public service news – especially those who use it regularly – may well have a different perspective on it than those who do not.
And indeed, this is what we find. If we compare across three groups – first, those who say they have not used the main public service news provider in their country in the last week, second, those who say they have used it once or twice, and, third, those who say they have used it three times or more – the differences are clear and striking.
It is not only the case that those who use public service media news services are more likely to say they are important for them personally (this makes sense, and the causality could go both ways). It is also the case that those who use these services – in particular those who use them frequently – are much more likely to see these services as important for society, perhaps in part based on the content they see. These findings clearly suggest that the breadth of public service news reach and frequency of use are important drivers of people’s experience and perception of both their personal and societal importance and potentially, by extension, their political legitimacy.
This is an important finding because recognising the relationship between people’s experience of using public service news services and their perception of societal importance helps inform our understanding of other factors that might influence their opinion, for example, their age, level of education, or political orientation.
At a first glance, the data would suggest that, for example, younger people, those with lower levels of formal education, and those who are politically on the right are less likely than others to think that public service news services are important for society. Do these correlations hold up when also considering use? Statistical analysis suggests that only some of them do.
Age, for example, is not a significant variable when controlling for use, whereas level of education and political orientation remain significant. This means that lower perceived importance of public service media news services among younger people likely have nothing to do with age per se, and more to do with the fact that many younger people, who have grown up preferring digital, mobile, and platform media, have little or no experience of using these services. Young people who actually use them are no less likely than older peers to see them as important. This underlines how important it is for their long-term legitimacy that public service media reach young people and serve them better.
Education, in contrast, is still a significant predictor of people’s perception of public service media news, also when we take frequency of use into account. Those with higher levels of education are more likely to say they think public service media news services are important for society. It is not clear what the underlying causal mechanism is here, but given discussions of the relative lack of diversity in public service news media, also in terms of class, it is possible that less privileged parts of the public are less likely to see themselves and their sensibilities reflected, represented, and respected by public service media news than white-collar professionals with university degrees are. (It is probable that similar dynamics exist around lack of diversity and representation when it comes to, for example, ethnicity and religion, but our data are not detailed enough, and our sample size not large enough, to allow us to address this.)
Finally, political orientation too remains a significant predictor, also when we take frequency of use into account. Respondents who place themselves on the political left are more likely to say that public service news media are important for society than those who place themselves in the centre, those who place themselves on the right, or those who are more politically disengaged. Several different factors could contribute to this. One possibility is ideological conviction – those on the political right might be less positive about government intervention in the media market, as they might be of government intervention in any market. Another is variable trust – in several, but not all, countries, those on the left trust public service news more than others. Elite cues could also play a role, as right-wing politicians often attack public service media and those who support these politicians may take a lead from them.
This kind of closer statistical analysis is useful both in dispelling the idea that age in itself matters and confirming that other social and political factors, including education and political orientation, do play a role. It also finds that use – personal experience of public service news – is the strongest and most consistent predictor of whether people believe public service media news services are important for society.
What is the relation between perceived importance of public service and using other media?
An additional issue our data can help illuminate is the relationship between public service media news services and private sector competitors. For-profit news publishers often fear that public service providers will crowd them out of the market, whereas public service media often argue that their services contribute to what is sometimes called ‘market conditioning’, effectively increasing demand by stimulating interest and serving as a gateway to other providers. To our knowledge, no peer-reviewed academic research has found support for the crowding-out effect when it comes to news (Sehl et al. 2020), but it remains a real enough concern – and is loudly enough proclaimed – that it merits continual consideration.
One way to shed further light on this issue is to consider the relationship between people’s perception of whether public service media news services are important for society and their use of other news sources, specifically the offline and online offers of newspaper publishers, who often are most concerned about crowding out. Looking again at a subset of the markets covered, we consistently find that respondents who think public service media are important for society are also slightly more likely to have used a newspaper brand offline or online in the past week. It seems that the sense of direct antagonism and zero-sum trade-offs between private provision and public service that some newspaper editorials express is not a view shared by many of their own readers. Instead, belief in the importance of public service media seems to go hand in hand with newspaper readership.
The breadth of public service news reach is central for public perception of its importance
In summary, a closer analysis of whether – and which – respondents feel that public service media news services are important for them personally, and/or for society, demonstrates that the experience of actually using these services is by far the strongest predictor of people’s assessment of their importance. When taking use into account, other factors like age are no longer statistically significant, and factors that are – including level of education and political orientation – are still less important than use. Those with limited levels of formal education and those who are politically on the right (or disconnected) still tend to value public service if they use it, and across all groups, a belief in the importance of public service media news services often goes hand in hand with use of other sources of news in our analysis of newspaper brands (whether offline or online).
These findings have important strategic implications. If public service media at least in part base their political legitimacy on the public’s experience of and belief in their importance, then the most important groups to convince are younger people, those with lower levels of formal education, and those on the political right as well as the politically disengaged. And the thing that may change their view is the experience of using public service news. In contrast, a narrower ‘market failure’ remit that limits public service media to specific tasks that often draw little public attention, or other incentives and forms of governance that orient them towards primarily catering to the needs and interests of older, highly educated people and those on their political left, will probably further erode public support.