A Crisis of Imagination:
International Models for Funding and Protecting
Independent Journalism and Public Media
A Survey of 14 Leading Democracies by Rodney Benson and Matthew Powers
The crisis in American journalism is not just an
economic crisis, it is a crisis of imagination. While
there is broad agreement that the current situation is
a classic case of “market failure,” remedial action is
stymied by the fear that any public policy cure would
be worse than the disease. But the experiences of
other leading democracies suggests otherwise.
In a forthcoming report for Free Press, we survey the
concrete ways that democratic nation-states around
the world fund and protect the autonomy of public
media. Countries examined in this report are:
Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland,
France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, The Netherlands,
New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United
Kingdom.
In the 14 countries examined in this study, public
media independence and democratic functioning are
promoted through a variety of means.
• In several countries, including Australia,
England, Denmark, and Germany, funding is
established for multi-year periods, thus
lessening the capacity of the government to
directly link funding to either approval or
disapproval of public programming.
• Public media seem to be strongest when
citizens feel that media are responsive to them
rather than to politicians or advertisers (i.e.,
when they are truly
“public”). Systems Public media are
funded by the
license fee – a fee strongest when
assessed on media citizens feel
users to be spent that media are
only on public
media – create a responsive to them.
direct link between
public media and their audiences. Community
advisory boards (used in England and Ireland)
are another way to foster citizen engagement
and involvement.
Ful
For l Repo
from thcom rt
Fre ing
eP
ress
• T h e l e g a l a n d a d m i n i s t r a t i ve c h a r t e r s
establishing public media systems abroad help
to assure that public funds are spent in the
public interest -- providing diverse, high-quality
news and other content. At the same time, these
charters and related media laws restrict the
capacity of governments to exert influence over
content in a partisan direction, as in “content-
neutral” subsidies to newspapers, or guidelines
that prohibit governments from revising funding
levels except according to very narrow technical
criteria.
• Public agencies and/or administrative boards of
one type or another exist in all countries to serve
as a buffer between the public broadcasters and
the government in power. The independence of
such agencies or boards is bolstered through a
variety of means: through staggered terms,
limiting the capacity of a new government to
immediately control all appointments; through
dispersal of authority to make appointments;
and by creating an “arms-length” institutional
relationship between the public broadcasters and
partisan political interference or meddling.
As a result of these policies, not only have public
broadcasters continued to provide high-quality,
diverse programming, they have also been responsible
for airing critical investigations of government
performance. According to a growing body of scholarly
research, public media provide more and higher
quality public affairs programming and a greater
diversity of genres and unique perspectives than their
commercial counterparts. Publicly subsidized
newspapers are just as critical, if not more critical of
government as are their advertising-subsidized
competitors.
Today, democratic public media systems in Europe,
North America, and elsewhere face challenges on a
number of fronts. Far more than partisan political
meddling, European scholars and journalists we
consulted for this study emphasized the threat to
public media posed by increasing commercial commercial media, as well as from the European
pressures, and in general, the increasing difficulty of Commission, which is raising the specter of unfair
balancing demands to simultaneously appeal to large state-sponsored competition against market actors (a
audiences and to uphold public service values such as criticism, it should be noted, that commercial
high-quality programming across multiple genres, in- channels, many of them privatized in the 1980s, have
depth information, promotion of democratic been making since their inception).
citizenship, and inclusion/representation of diverse
voices and viewpoints. In sum, even as public media face new challenges and
difficulties, this report establishes the continuing
Some public media systems are better funded and international viability, indeed vitality, of the public
operated than others. Our survey highlights the service model and provides a range of positive policy
notable strengths of public media systems in the prescriptions for the United States as it considers
U.K., Germany, and Scandinavian countries. In needed expansions of its own very modest public
contrast, due to erosion in both the amount of media system.
funding and procedures for assuring arms-length
autonomy from direct
governmental control Publicly funded media
(shift from license fee abroad are providing
to direct government Rodney Benson is associate professor and director of
funding, shift from more and higher
graduate studies in the Department of Media, Culture,
multi-year to annual quality public affairs and Communication at New York University. Benson’s
funding, and/or
decreases in funding
programming and a research comparing the U.S. and French press was
recently featured in the Columbia Journalism Review. He
levels, etc.), public greater diversity of has written numerous articles on U.S. and European
media have arguably genres and unique news media. His book Framing Immigration: How the
been weakened in French and American Media Shape Public Debate is
recent years in The perspectives than
forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Netherlands, Canada, their commercial
New Zealand, and
counterparts.
Australia. Matthew Powers is a PhD candidate at New York
University in the department of Media, Culture and
Likewise, in the transition to digital and Internet Communication. His research interests include the
platforms, countries with public service broadcasting sociology of news, comparative media and political
are adopting a variety of approaches to maintain or communication. 
increase public funding, some more conducive than
others to maintaining an important role for public
service media. Historically, levying of license fees has
been determined simply by the presence or absence
of a television in the home (as is still the case in most
countries with the fees). Recently, though, countries
such as Denmark have altered this definition
somewhat to include any device that can display
television content (e.g. computers). Other
Scandinavian countries are discussing a shift from the
narrowly conceived television license fee to a more
general media fee (Finland) or replacing it with direct
government funding (Norway).
For more information on this research, contact
While advertising or on-line merchandising might Josh Stearns, Associate Program Director at
seem to offer an additional means of funding the Free Press: jstearns@freepress.net.
expansion of public media online, public service
broadcasters already are facing stiff opposition from