In the Public Service Media Review’s statement of December 2024, Ofcom concluded that, during the period 2019-23, the Public Service Broadcasters (i.e. the BBC, ITV, STV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and S4C) had collectively delivered against the public service broadcasting purposes and objectives set by Parliament (including, among other things, an obligation to provide a broad range of high-quality programmes and genres that meet the needs and interests of many different audiences).
As part of the 2019-23 Public Service Media Review, this Economics Discussion Paper uses a survey conducted in 2022 by Ipsos for Ofcom to assess the relationship between the use of PSBs for news by survey participants and a range of societal outcomes which are related to effective participation in a well-functioning democracy.
The analysis in this Discussion Paper shows that, compared to survey participants who do not use PSBs for news, survey participants who use PSBs for news are more knowledgeable about news facts, have higher levels of trust in democratic institutions and are more likely to have voted in the 2019 general election. They also tend to be less polarised than survey participants who do not use PSBs. While it does not establish a causal relationship between the use of PSBs for news and differences in societal outcomes, the analysis in the Discussion Paper controls for survey participants’ socio-demographic characteristics and their use of news sources other than PSBs (including commercial TVs, newspapers and magazines and social media). A range of alternative specifications and robustness checks confirms the findings above.
