Why have many democracies invested public funds in broadcasting?

The world's most influential model for broadcast news is the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It employs around five thousand journalists and maintains some forty foreign bureaus. (The New York Times, in comparison, employs about one thousand journalists. CBS News has about 150 journalists on staff.) Other European nations also have substantial public broadcasting systems with much larger audiences than public broadcasting in the United States—including the Nordic countries, Germany, France, and others.

In a 2011 study of public broadcasting in ten European democracies plus the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, researchers calculated that the United States invested less than four dollars per capita per year in public radio and television. The next lowest investors were Canada and New Zealand at $30 per capita and Australia at $34. Britain spends $90 per capita while at the high end Denmark, Norway, and Germany all provide over $130 per capita.

The BBC began in the 1920s and received its royal charter as a public corporation in 1926. Its influential first director, John Reith, did not believe its news service should provide propaganda for the government, but he did believe that, in both news and entertainment, radio should knit together a common culture for Britain. One acquaintance said Reith spoke "as though he was in charge of the national well-being." That is exactly what he took the BBC's job to be. He held that it was the BBC's responsibility "to carry into the greatest possible number of homes everything that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavor, and achievement, and to avoid things which are, or may be, hurtful." As early as 1923, Reith urged King George V to use the BBC to address the nation on Christmas or New Year's. Only in 1932 did the king finally comply. By 1934 he addressed the audience in his Christmas message as "the members of our worldwide family," establishing an annual ritual that continues to this day.

At first, the BBC's charter forbade discussion or coverage of controversy on air. Although this ban was removed in 1928, a genuine political independence in news coverage began only in the mid-1950s when rivalry with the newly established commercial broadcasting service, ITV, "had the effect of detaching the BBC from the apron strings of the state," as BBC historian Paddy Scannell put it.

Whereas in most countries newspapers and magazines preceded national sovereignty, broadcasting appeared after the establishment of independent nation-states or was quickly appropriated by the first postcolonial governments. In most societies, less gun-shy of central governmental authority than the United States, this has led to powerful state broadcasting. It has also produced in most cases successful efforts to maintain what the British call an "arm's-l ength" distance between the government in power and the quasi-independent boards that govern broadcasting. The legislation or government orders establishing public broadcasting in contemporary democracies all promise the broadcaster substantial or effectively complete editorial independence from the state.

The United States has some entities like its National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and National Endowment for the Humanities that, though funded by the federal government, preserve normal scientific "peer review" as the primary decision-making mechanism for establishing scientific research priorities and making grants to scholars. The United States sought to emulate other democracies in setting up the Public Broadcasting Service in 1967 but comparable funding never followed.