The Democratic Value of News: Why Public Service Media Matter

In information-rich democracies there remains widespread concern about the "quality" of news and how it can be evaluated to deliver informed citizenship. This book compares the democratic value of news produced by public and market-driven media, asking whether citizens should continue to subsidize public service media in an already crowded commercial landscape of news.

Carrying out a comprehensive meta-analysis of internationally informed empirical news studies and reviewing the impact news has on people's knowledge, civic participation and levels of trust towards competing media systems, this study finds that the democratic value of news is more likely to be enhanced when it is produced by public rather than market-driven media. For all the commercial choice and competition in contemporary news culture, it is argued that public service media not only remain distinctive from market-driven media they contribute to raising the editorial standards of journalism more widely.