Public broadcasting


Public broadcasting is radio, television, and other electronic media whose primary mission is public service with a commitment to avoiding political and commercial influence. Public broadcasters receive funding from public financing, license fees, individual contributions and donations, commercial advertising and corporate underwriting.
A public service broadcaster should operate as a non-partisan, non-profit entity, guided by a clear public interest mandate. Public service broadcasters must be safeguarded from external interference—especially of a political or commercial nature—in matters related to governance, budgeting, and editorial decision-making. The public service broadcasting model relies on an independent and transparent system of governance, encompassing key areas such as editorial policy, managerial appointments, and financial oversight.
Common media include AM, FM, and shortwave radio; television; and the Internet. Public broadcasting may be nationally or locally operated, depending on the country and the station. In some countries a single organization runs public broadcasting. Other countries have multiple public-broadcasting organizations operating regionally or in different languages. Historically, public broadcasting was once the dominant or only form of broadcasting in many countries.

Definition

The primary mission of public broadcasting is that of public service, speaking to and engaging as a citizen. The British model is often referenced in definitions. The model embodies the following principles:
  • Universal geographic accessibility
  • Universal appeal
  • Attention to minorities
  • Contribution to national identity and sense of community
  • Distance from vested interests
  • Direct funding and universality of payment
  • Encourage competition "in good programming rather than competition for numbers"
  • Guidelines that liberate rather than restrict
While the application of certain principles may be straightforward, as in the case of accessibility, some of the principles may be poorly defined or difficult to implement. In the context of a shifting national identity, the role of public broadcasting may be unclear. Likewise, the subjective nature of good programming may raise the question of individual or public taste.
Within public broadcasting there are two different views regarding commercial activity. One is that public broadcasting is incompatible with commercial objectives. The other is that public broadcasting can and should compete in the marketplace with commercial broadcasters. This dichotomy is highlighted by the public service aspects of traditional commercial broadcasters.
Public broadcasters in each jurisdiction may or may not be synonymous with government controlled broadcasters.

Cultural policy

Additionally, public broadcasting may facilitate the implementation of a cultural policy. Examples include:
  • In Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is legally required to 'encourage and promote the musical, dramatic and other performing arts in Australia' and 'broadcasting programmes that contribute to a sense of national identity' with specific emphasis on regional and rural Australia'. Furthermore, the Special Broadcasting Service is intended to reflect the spirit and sense of multicultural richness and the unique international cultural values within Australian society.

    Etymology

Who exactly coined the term "public broadcasting" is disputed. Various sources credit Morris S. Novik, who served 20 years as station manager for New York City's WNYC, the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting, and the Rocky Mountain Radio Council.

Operating structures

When television started out in many countries in the 1960's, the reliance on analogue terrestrial television severely limited the number of possible TV channels in a geographical area, and many countries only had 1 or 2 channels until well into the 1980's. As such, there were heavy differences between countries' approaches during that time on how to operate those channels, including:
  • 1 channel operated by 1 company.
  • 2 channels operated by 1 company.
  • Regional public broadcasters co-operating to create national channels.
  • Regional public broadcasters with no national co-operations.
  • 1 or 2 channels with timeslots allocated to various broadcaster companies.
  • Local public broadcasters co-operating to create national channels.
As digital satellite television and analogue cable television became broadly available in large parts of Europe and elsewhere in the 1980's, which both opened up more channel frequencies for existing public broadcasters and made foreign-based commercial channels like Sky Television available even in countries that didn't allow them at the time, the public broadcasters' operating structures became less strict, though many of their core structures remain in for instance Germany and The Netherlands as of 2025.

Economics

Public broadcasters may receive their funding from an obligatory television licence fee, individual contributions, government funding or commercial sources. Public broadcasters do not rely on advertising to the same degree as commercial broadcasters, or at all; this allows public broadcasters to transmit programmes that are not commercially viable to the mass market, such as public affairs shows, radio and television documentaries, and educational programmes.
One of the principles of public broadcasting is to provide coverage of interests for which there are missing or small markets. Public broadcasting attempts to supply topics of social benefit that are otherwise not provided by commercial broadcasters. Typically, such underprovision is argued to exist when the benefits to viewers are relatively high in comparison to the benefits to advertisers from contacting viewers. This frequently is the case in undeveloped countries that normally have low benefits to advertising.
An alternative funding model proposed by Michael Slaby is to give every citizen credits they can use to pay qualified media sources for civic information and reporting.
In the early 2020s, many of the public international broadcasters that court audiences abroad have seen their budgets shrink, with the exception of Deutsche Welle, while state media outlets from authoritarian countries like Russia, China and Iran have been increasing their budgets since the early 2000s.

Select examples

Brazil

In Brazil, the two main national broadcasters are Empresa Brasil de Comunicação and the Fundação Padre Anchieta. EBC was created in 2007 to manage the Brazilian federal government's radio and television stations. EBC owns broadcast the television channel TV Brasil, the radio stations Rádio Nacional and Rádio MEC, broadcast to Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Recife, and Tabatinga, Rádio Nacional da Amazônia, a shortwave radio station based in Brasília with programming aimed to the population of the Amazon region, and Agência Brasil, a news agency. Starting in 2021, EBC expanded the coverage of its radio stations through the new FM extended band to the metropolitan areas of São Paulo, Belo Horizonte and Recife, important Brazilian regions which did not have EBC radio stations.
Fundação Padre Anchieta is a non-profit foundation created by the government of the state of São Paulo in 1967 and includes a national educational public television network, two radio stations, two educational TV channels aimed at distance education, and the children's TV channel TV Rá-Tim-Bum, available nationally on pay TV.
Many Brazilian states also have regional and statewide public radio and television stations. One example is Minas Gerais, which has the EMC, a public corporation created in 2016 modelled on EBC, formed by Rede Minas, a statewide television network and the two stations of Rádio Inconfidência, which operates in AM, FM and shortwave; in the state of Pará, the state-funded foundation FUNTELPA operates the public educational state-wide television network Rede Cultura do Pará and Rádio Cultura, a public radio station which broadcasts in FM for Belém. The state of Espírito Santo has the RTV-ES, with its television channel TVE-ES and an AM radio station, and in Rio Grande do Sul, the state-wide public television channel TVE-RS and the public radio station FM Cultura are the two public broadcasters in the state. Regional public television channels in Brazil often broadcast part of TV Brasil or TV Cultura programming among with some hours of local programming.
Since the government of Michel Temer, EBC has received several criticism from some politicians for having an alleged political bias. The president of Brazil from 2019 to 2022, Jair Bolsonaro, said in his campaign for the presidential election in 2018 that the public broadcaster is allegedly a "job hanger" and has proposed to privatize or extinguish the public company. On April 9, 2021, the president inserted the public company into the National Privatization Program, with the intention of carrying out studies about the possibility of privatization of the public broadcaster. Some states often had problems with their public broadcasting services. In São Paulo, FPA had sometimes dealt with budget cuts, labor disputes and strikes. In Rio Grande do Sul, TVE-RS and FM Cultura were managed by the Piratini Foundation, a non-profit state foundation. However, due to the public debt crisis in the state, in 2018, the Piratini Foundation had its activities closed, and TVE-RS and FM Cultura started to be managed by the Secretariat of Communication of the state government.
Brazil also has many campus radio and community radio stations and several educational local TV channels.

Canada

In Canada, the main public broadcaster is the national Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a crown corporation – which originated as a radio network in November 1936. It is the successor to the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, which was established by the administration of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett in 1932, modeled on recommendations made in 1929 by the Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting and stemming from lobbying efforts by the Canadian Radio League. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation took over operation of the CRBC's nine radio stations. The CBC eventually expanded to television in September 1952 with the sign-on of CBFT in Montreal; CBFT was the first television station in Canada to initiate full-time broadcasts, which initially served as a primary affiliate of the French language Télévision de Radio-Canada and a secondary affiliate of the English language CBC Television service.
CBC operates two national television networks, four radio networks and several cable television channels including two 24-hour news channels in both of Canada's official languages – English and French – and the French-language channels Ici Explora and Ici ARTV, dedicated to science and culture respectively. CBC's national television operations and some radio operations are funded partly by advertisements, in addition to the subsidy provided by the federal government. The cable channels are commercial entities owned and operated by the CBC and do not receive any direct public funds, however, they do benefit from synergies with resources from the other CBC operations. The CBC has frequently dealt with budget cuts and labour disputes, often resulting in a debate about whether the service has the resources necessary to properly fulfill its mandate.
, all of CBC Television's terrestrial stations are owned and operated by the CBC directly. The number of privately owned CBC Television affiliates has gradually declined in recent years, as the network has moved its programming to stations opened by the corporation or has purchased certain affiliates from private broadcasting groups; budgetary issues led the CBC to choose not to launch new rebroadcast transmitters in markets where the network disaffiliated from a private station after 2006; the network dropped its remaining private affiliates in 2016, when CJDC-TV—Dawson Creek and CFTK-TV—Terrace, British Columbia defected from CBC Television that February and Lloydminster-based CKSA-DT disaffiliated in August of that year. The CBC's decision to disaffiliate from these and other privately owned stations, as well as the corporation decommissioning its network of rebroadcasters following Canada's transition to digital television in August 2011 have significantly reduced the terrestrial coverage of both CBC Television and Ici Radio-Canada Télé; the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission does require cable, satellite and IPTV providers to carry CBC and Radio-Canada stations as part of their basic tier, regardless of terrestrial availability in an individual market. Of the three major French-language television networks in Canada, Ici Radio-Canada Télé is the only one that maintains terrestrial owned-and-operated stations and affiliates in all ten Canadian provinces, although it maintains only one station that serves the four provinces comprising Atlantic Canada.
In recent years, the CBC has also expanded into new media ventures including the online radio service CBC Radio 3, music streaming service CBC Music, and the launch of online news services, such as CBC Hamilton, in some markets which are not directly served by their own CBC television or radio stations.
In addition, several provinces operate public broadcasters; these are not CBC subentities, but distinct networks in their own right. Most of the provincial services maintain an educational programming format, differing from the primarily entertainment-based CBC/Radio-Canada operations, but more closely formatted to the U.S.-based Public Broadcasting Service, which itself is available terrestrially and – under a CRTC rule that requires Canadian cable, satellite and IPTV providers to carry affiliates of the four major U.S. commercial networks and a PBS member station – through pay television providers in Canada via member stations located near the U.S.–Canada border. These educational public broadcasters include the English-language TVOntario and the French-language TFO in Ontario, Télé-Québec in Quebec, and Knowledge Network in British Columbia. TVO and Télé-Québec operate through conventional transmitters and cable, while TFO and Knowledge Network are cable-only channels. Beyond these and other provincial services, Canada does not have a national public educational network.
Canada is also home to a number of former public broadcasting entities that have gone private. CTV2 Alberta, which was licensed as an educational television station in Alberta until 2017, was once owned by the Alberta government as the public broadcaster Access. In 1993, the provincial government agreed to cease to direct funding of Access after the 1994 fiscal year; the channel was sold to CHUM Limited in 1995, which initially acquired the channel through a majority-owned subsidiary, Learning and Skills Television of Alberta Limited. As CTV2 Alberta was previously licensed as an educational station, the service previously broadcast educational and children's programming during the daytime hours and entertainment programming in the evenings; it would abandon the educational format altogether in 2017 in favor of carrying the full CTV2 schedule. The service discontinued its broadcast transmitters in Calgary and Edmonton in August 2011, due to the expense of transitioning the two stations to digital, and the fact that the service had mandatory carriage on television providers serving Alberta regardless of whether it ran over-the-air transmitters. The service has since operated as part of Bell Media's CTV2 chain of stations.
Public radio station CKUA in Alberta was also formerly operated by Access, before being sold to the non-profit CKUA Radio Foundation which continues to operate it as a community-funded radio network. CJRT-FM in Toronto also operated as a public government-owned radio station for many years; while no longer funded by the provincial government, it still solicits most of its budget from listener and corporate donations and is permitted to air only a very small amount of commercial advertising.
City Saskatchewan originated as the Saskatchewan Communications Network, a cable-only educational and cultural public broadcaster owned by the government of Saskatchewan. SCN was sold to Bluepoint Investment Corporation in 2010, and like CTV Two Alberta did when it became privatized, incorporated a limited schedule of entertainment programming during the late afternoon and nighttime hours, while retaining educational and children's programs during the morning until mid-afternoon to fulfill its licensing conditions; Bluepoint later sold the channel to Rogers Media in 2012, expanding a relationship it began with SCN in January of that year, when Rogers began supplying entertainment programming to the channel through an affiliation agreement with its English-language broadcast network, Citytv. One television station, CFTU in Montreal, operates as an educational station owned by CANAL, a private not-for-profit consortium of educational institutions in the province of Quebec.
Some local community stations also operate non-commercially with funding from corporate and individual donors. In addition, cable companies are required to produce a local community channel in each licensed market. Such channels have traditionally aired community talk shows, city council meetings and other locally oriented programming, although it is becoming increasingly common for them to adopt the format and branding of a local news channel.
Canada also has a large number of campus radio and community radio stations.