Public Service Media Reloaded

March 09, 2026

Public Service Media Reloaded

Public broadcasting was always used by governments to manage public opinion. The explosive growth of commercial television in the last quarter of the previous century mitigated the effect introducing a pluralistic landscape, not just in news but across all aspects of TV and radio production. The re-balancing worked for a while but as corporate media began to accumulate more power themselves, they too began to manipulate the news agenda against the public interest.

Mostly they did it in collusion with the governments of the day which were convinced over the years to de-fund and incapacitate public service media, in exchange for the political support of profit-making broadcasters. Public broadcasting struggled to keep up with the new corporate giants which devoured everything in their path, pandering to capital, lobbying governments and stretching market logic to its limits. But, while viewers got caught up in the distracting spectacle on offer and as transparency of ownership was blurred through financialization, public trust disintegrated.

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Then came the web and large online platforms hijacked news management flows and numbed our brains. By then the impact of broadcasting – public, and by this time, private too – began to shrink.

Tech-oligarchs, not TV owners, took charge of the game, algorithmically curating everyone’s news intake, including that produced by broadcasting, which was itself forced to jump on platforms to compete. The ‘silent management’ that public broadcasters once exercised and private corporate media later took over, fell into the manipulative hands of irresponsible online platforms whose algorithmic trickery distorted public discourse, eroding human agency and endangering the democratic process.

Public broadcasting in fact became so irrelevant that when Donald Trump returned to power last year he did not even seek to ‘capture’ it as any self-respecting autocrat would have done; he opted instead to de-fund and ultimately shut it down. Public broadcasting was seen as a waste of public funds but mostly as the hub of liberal thinking MAGA wanted silenced.

Trump sought servility from a very willing, as it turned out, tech-oligarchy. He also facilitated his friend Larry Ellison’s purchase of CNN which is now likely to create a new private monopoly as he merges it with CBS News. As a result, last month, after 60 years of existence, the non-profit public corporation in charge of annually allocating 500m dollars to public radio and tv stations across the US announced that it was dissolving as a result of federal funding cuts.

Things may not be as bad in Europe, yet. Public service media (PSM) remain crucial in guaranteeing informed democratic discourse, quality news and access to accurate, impartial, and diverse information (admittedly in varying measure; better in Sweden and Denmark, less so in Hungary and Romania). But the climate is changing. Assisted by Russia’s effective and still underestimated disinformation establishment, charlatans like Nigel Farage in Britain attacked the BBC as ‘the enemy’ and autocrats like Viktor Orban repurposed Hungarian public broadcasting as a propaganda tool.

While the EU remains resolute in safeguarding the independence and integrity of PSM, incentivizing member states to invest more is not happening fast enough.

Which is why societies have to be reminded of a fundamental but completely forgotten notion: Public Service Media belong to the public. They are there to serve the citizenry. Not the state, not the governments, and certainly not the appetites of would-be autocrats. Unlike commercial outlets, and certainly unlike pernicious online platforms, PSM are mandated – obliged – to offer content that supports informed citizenship, political pluralism, and social cohesion. In a context in which public trust in news has disintegrated, PSM are expected to counter disinformation, offer serious and balanced reporting and represent minority voices.

For this to work we all need to snap-out of the mindset that treats PSM as an economic burden and see them as key institutions with a democracy-protecting role. In several US states Trump’s de-funding of public media has resulted in increased citizens donations to save them, a movement described as ‘rage giving’. It’s an interesting signal.

In Cyprus, the government of the day has always held sway over public broadcasting by appointing the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation’s board. But it is the political parties – by approving its government-proposed annual budget in parliament – that have consistently leveraged their power with demands over its news coverage. They have to back off.

The CyBC, which admittedly is plagued by long standing administrative weaknesses, should be reformed and then allowed to fulfill its crucial public duty role. Its news division’s budget should be substantively boosted to help bring innovation to its newsrooms and journalists must be offered the continuous re-training denied to them by years of cuts. At a time of AI infiltration into most news outlets, at the expense of quality journalism, the CyBC should be strengthened to deal with it ethically and by doubling down on human-led journalism. It also has a central role to play in promoting media literacy in the country.

Despite its problems Cypriots still have a soft spot for the CyBC as the recorder of the country’s turbulent modern history. In some way this may apply to Britons and the BBC. Yet, mostly because of the war of attrition by profit-making channels and the populist tendency of belittling rather than strengthening public institutions, they have lost the public’s trust. It’s a reversible trend once citizens awaken to the notion that these media are theirs and are there to serve them. A notion that also needs to be digested by the political establishment, whose instincts, regrettably, remain stuck on restricting rather than supporting editorial independence.