Professor Christian Fuchs, Professor and Director of the Communication and Media Research Institute, wrote an article for The Conversation about why public service media should be expanded online rather than be privatised.
In the article, Professor Fuchs discusses the reports that the UK government is pushing ahead with an investigation into privatising Channel 4. In the article, he wrote: “The BBC and Channel 4 are non-profit media organisations that are editorially independent from governments and private companies and have a public service remit.
“In the ‘post-truth era’, in which trust in news is at a premium, this model should not be undermined, but sustained and expanded. But instead, public service media is under attack. It has been widely reported that the Johnson government has investigated abolishing the BBC licence fee, while in 2020 it announced its intentions to decriminalise licence-fee evasion.”
Discussing his research, he wrote: “Research indicates that we need more public service media, not less – and not just in broadcasting. For the netCommons research project, a team of researchers I led, found that a lot of people have reservations about the business model of many large social media companies operating online.”
He added: “In an age of ‘fake news’ and post-truth politics, the existence of high-quality media organisations both in broadcasting and online is more critical than ever. There’s a crying need for a news media that serves public, not private, interests. They should be media of the public, by the public, and for the public – media of the public sphere.”
Read the full article on The Conversation’s website.
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