Without a centre, there cannot be periphery, merely a number of unconnected and deeply divided spheres. The Internet was designed as a space of dispersed networks but democratic debate requires a central space in which ideas can be both heard and contested. These voices have not necessarily been progressive and have often been disruptive, but the ability to collectively demonstrate outrage has forced that anger into the mainstream, where it has crossed over from the insulated bubbles of private complaint and into public consciousness.īut without the continuing existence of mainstream media, producing common news narratives available to all, at both local and national level, the Internet will too easily become a place that divides us into factions rather than uniting us into communities. The Internet has undoubtedly opened up channels of communication for subaltern voices. ( Sorry, Spain.) America’s public broadcasters, PBS and NPR, also score high on trust, but their audiences are smaller and their reputations more split by ideology than those of their European peers.Īs Eiri Elvestad and Angela Phillips put it in 2018 in a review of the literature around public service broadcasters (PSBs), all emphases mine: When Pew asked people in eight rich Western European democracies what news organizations they trusted most, the country’s public broadcaster finished No. This is the role that a good, well-resourced public service broadcaster can play in a democracy: a central hub of trust that is enjoyed (or at least tolerated) by a wide swath of the ideological public. The “elite” mainstream media attracts an audience well left of center, and cable news audiences are sharply divided between left and right.) There’s no major news organization as squarely in the middle major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS) and browser-homepages-your-gramps-never-got-around-to-changing (AOL, Yahoo) come closest. (Contrast with the United States data for media polarization. The BBC functions as a heat sink for polarization - converting potentially dangerous energy into something the system can more easily deal with. And look how much bigger the BBC’s audience is than any of its peers. And it’s almost exactly in the middle for populist attitudes as well the BBC’s audience is much more populist than The Economist’s or the FT’s, but much less populist than readers of the country’s major tabloids. The BBC’s audience is almost exactly split between liberals and conservatives. And for the two sets of red circles, we’re talking about how populist the audience is: left = not populist, middle = kinda populist, right = super populist.Ĭheck out those BBC circles in the U.K. And the left-right axes here represent the average views of each outlet’s audience.įor the two sets of blue circles, we’re talking about the audience’s political views: left = liberal, middle = centrist, right = conservative. Two things to know: The size of each circle here represents the size of a news outlet’s audience. to Americans, I like to show them this chart from the 2019 Digital News Report comparing the U.S. To explain the role the BBC plays in the U.K. (Anyone whose government spends more than $3 per capita on public media per year should feel free to skip this section. And that puts one of the core purposes of a public service broadcaster - serving as a central, trustworthy anchor in a country’s media ecosystem - at a new level of risk. But now it’s facing a remarkable array of new private-sector competitors - and public-sector overseers - that all seem to have Auntie Beeb, in various ways, in their sights. The world’s largest broadcaster, the BBC has remained iconic through the generations - criticized regularly, of course, but nonetheless capturing the trust and attention of Britons like nothing else. Forgive the staff of BBC News if they seem a bit…shaken these days: They have a lot more than virus fears on their minds.
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