Digital News Report 2026. Episode 7: The social impact of public service news

Jim, welcome to the podcast.

Hi, Mitali.

So we'll do a framing question before we do a scene setting question, which is what was the core question that we were trying to answer or get an answer from the audiences on with regards to public service broadcasters and social impact?

Yeah, thanks.

So we asked this question in 26 markets out of the 48, which we include within the scope of the digital news reports.

And we chose the markets essentially on the basis of them having well-established and highly recognized public service broadcasters or public service media organizations.

or organizations in their countries.

Most of the markets were in Europe.

We did also ask the question in Canada and the United States and also in three Asia Pacific markets.

The question that we asked, and it's probably worth me just reading it out so everyone's completely clear about the inquiry here, is we asked quite a simple question.

We said, overall, do you think the news provided by public service broadcasters has a positive or negative effect on life in your country?

It's a good setup for what we describe as the engine when we talk about public service media.

What are the hallmarks of what constitutes PSPs, PSMs, and what sort of examples should people think of when we're having this conversation?

We left the question deliberately open.

So we didn't specifically prompt people about particular public service broadcasters in their country.

So we invited people to think about whatever public service broadcasters came to mind.

And that's relevant in a number of markets where there's not just one PSB, but there's a sort of a public service ecosystem, so to speak.

Just in case people weren't quite clear what we meant by the term public service broadcast, it is a bit of an industry phrase.

We provided an example of a public service broadcaster in each country.

And that's the way we approach the question.

And just to stress that we weren't asking people to rate public service broadcasters as organizations.

We weren't asking them to provide a view on the output of these public service media.

We were asking them to think about the wider social impact of public service news in the countries where people live.

And the reason why we did this is that, as we see elsewhere in the Digital News Report, the role of media and consumption of media is changing very, very quickly.

In many countries, we're in a more polarized and sort of tense environment in terms of the relationship between politics, media, and everyday life.