Public Broadcasting, Public Funding and the Public Interest: How Government Broadcasting Subsidies Affect Political Knowledge and Participation.

Abstract

One way media institutions differ is whether they are public or commercial. This project uses basic principles of political economy to analyze the differing incentives that commercial and public broadcasters have to provide information-rich programming and the resulting impacts on political knowledge and participation. Because audiences prefer entertainment to news, advertisers prefer reaching large audiences, and the profit motive underpins commercial broadcasting; I predict that commercial broadcasters will provide entertainment programming instead of news to maximize profits. Non-profit public broadcasters may have broader goals than making money, but still have to maximize their audience to attract advertisers. Therefore, I predict that only non-profits (public) who receive direct government subsidies will provide programming most rich in political information, which will translate into the highest levels of political knowledge among viewers. Using two waves of Eurobarometer data from 1999 and 2006, I find that individuals who watch public broadcasting have higher levels of political knowledge, but only in countries that subsidize their public broadcaster. The subsidy effect is the highest among countries that subsidize the largest percentage of their public broadcaster’s budget. Importantly, the subsidy effect also narrows the gap in knowledge between socioeconomic groups, which allows poorer and less educated individuals to participate in the political process on a more even playing field with their more educated and wealthier counterparts. This power only comes into full effect if public broadcasting can maintain its audience share, however. The project also explains the differences in audience share across public broadcasters by showing how decisions made at the dawn of the broadcasting age in the 1920s are the long-term determinants of the ability of public broadcasters to gain and maintain audience share. When initial policies favored public broadcasters, they parlayed that institutional advantage into a large-long term presence.