Keeping Democracies Alive: The Role of Public Service Media

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.