Do countries with better-funded public media also have healthier democracies? Of course they do

There’s a new book coming out in the U.K. this week called The BBC: A People’s History, by David Hendy. Its publisher calls it a “monumental work of popular history, making the case that the Beeb is as much of a national treasure as the NHS…a now global institution that defines Britain and created modern broadcasting.”

Cross the pond: While Americans generally like PBS and NPR, I wouldn’t expect them to come up quickly if you asked someone on the street to begin listing national treasures. (I’m even more sure America’s health care system would go unmentioned, too.) Who “created modern broadcasting” in the U.S.? It certainly wasn’t the two public broadcasters that didn’t hit airwaves until 1970. And what TV network is a “global institution” that “defines” the United States abroad? Apologies to PBS Newshour, but that’s CNN.

No one says “Auntie Peebs.”

It’s obvious that the U.S. approached the new broadcasting technologies of the 20th century in ways wildly different from their European peers — and in ways that reflect on the countries themselves. American radio began wild and unregulated, experimental, a bubbling font of creativity — and then quickly became commercialized, optimized for mass audiences and massive profits. The BBC, which turns 100 this year, was more structured, more statist, more controlled — but has remained more central to residents’ lives, more civic-minded, and more beloved.

Those different visions of public service broadcasting have affected how we get our news. But do they also affect something deeper — civic life, or democracy itself?

That’s the subject of a new paper out in The International Journal of Press/Politics. It’s titled “Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries” and it’s by Timothy Neff and Victor Pickard, both of Penn. (Well, they were both of Penn; Neff just moved to the University of Leicester, crossing that pond the other way.) There’s a free copy of the paper here for the underlibraried.

The abstract:

Many people — Pickard in particular — have called for public funding to fill the voids created by the decline of commercial news, especially local commercial news, in the United States. As he put it in his Nieman Lab prediction for this year: “In 2022, we will confront a stark choice: Either we build non-market systemic support for local journalism, or we condemn entire communities to a future of news deserts.”

As you might imagine, I agree that more public money for local journalism is a great idea. But I don’t think the direction of causality is at all clear here. Is America a “flawed” democracy because we don’t fund public media? Or does America not fund public media because we’re a flawed democracy?

It would, after all, be pretty on brand for the United States to build a system that relies on corporations seeking profits to meet public needs; to rely on our size and wealth to create and extend cultural hegemony; to put knowledge important to public debate behind a paywall; to view national unity as something to feed with rhetoric but not dollars.

There is a long line of research into the relationship between a state’s heterogeneity — how diverse its population is in terms of ethnicity, religion, language, and so on — and the relative size of the social safety net it is willing to fund. In essence, the more a country’s people see themselves as part of a unified us, the more likely they are to fund more generous social programs. The more they see their country through a Tucker Carlson lens — as a nightmarish mix of blood-sucking immigrants, ethnic others, and people who don’t look or act or sound like you — the less likely they are to want to chip in.

It’s no accident that the American states with the worst racial histories are also the ones that offer the weakest social safety nets. It’s not surprising that Scandinavian countries — long places of relative unity in terms of race, religion, and language — fund larger welfare states as well as more robust public media. And it’s also not surprising that, as those countries have grown more diverse, their safety nets are starting to tear.

Public broadcasters are part of a nation’s media-political system — but they’re also a result of it. More public funding of media would do some wonderful things on the ground to create more informed and engaged communities. But I suspect that even multiplying public funding 10× would do little to bridge the deeper divides in the American public that led to their underfunding in the first place.

Photo of BBC Studios in Belfast, Northern Ireland, by K. Mitch Hodge.

1. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s rankings.