Today, democratic public media systems in Europe, North America, and elsewhere face challenges on a number of fronts. Far more than partisan political meddling (though this has occurred in some cases, notably in France), European scholars and journalists we consulted for this study emphasized the threat to public broadcasters posed by increasing commercial pressures, and, in general, the increasing difficulty of balancing the need to appeal to a broad audience (to justify the license fee) and to uphold public service values such as high-quality programming across multiple genres, in-depth information, promotion of democratic citizenship, and provision of “access to and.
