Public service broadcasting organisations have the potential to play a crucial role in ensuring the public’s right to receive a wide diversity of information and ideas, by supplementing and complementing the programming provided by private broadcasters. At their best, they ensure the provision of quality news and current affairs programming, promote a sense of national identity, foster democratic and other important social values, provide quality educational and informational programming, and serve the needs of minority and other specialised interest groups.

Quality public service broadcasting requires three elements: free and independent broadcasting organisations, with sufficient resources to provide quality news, information, education and entertainment programming, subject to public accountability for the way in which they fulfil their mandates and utilise public resources. Formal guarantees and an independent governing board are the best ways to promote independence. The same board should serve as the key accountability mechanism, supplemented by formal reporting requirements, complaints processes, a variety of means of public input, such as consultative bodies and surveys, and possibly supervision by an independent regulatory body. Funding is perhaps the most controversial and difficult issue facing public service broadcasting organisations. While full public funding has some advantages, the reality is that it is becoming increasingly rare and that most public broadcasters are required to raise at least some funding themselves. Blended public and commercial revenue, with a distinct emphasis on the former, is increasingly becoming the norm for public service broadcasting organisations.

Public service broadcasting organisations can, where these ingredients are guaranteed, make a very significant contribution to the public’s right to know and diverse and pluralistic broadcasting to which citizens are entitled. Public service broadcasting organisations play a unique and vital role is satisfying the public interest and ensuring a free flow of information and ideas, and governments and other public actors must be urged to make a solid commitment to funding this essential public resource.

Toby Mendel is the Head of Law Programme at ARTICLE 19, a leading international human rights NGO based in London. In that capacity he has worked extensively on media issues in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East, advising governments and local NGOs, critiquing laws and taking cases to both national and international bodies. He has also published widely and contributed to numerous ARTICLE 19 publications, including on freedom of information, the rights of the child, public service broadcasting and false news.

He is at the same time completing a PhD in international refugee law at Cambridge University where he spent 2 ½ years before joining ARTICLE 19.

Prior to that, he worked extensively in the area of human rights, as a policy analyst at the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), with indigenous peoples in the Philippines and in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.