Can Public Broadcasting News Save Democracy in Digital Times? New Study by Dr. Kai Manke & Prof. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau
In our increasingly chaotic political arena, Public Broadcasting News (think: Germany’s 'Tagesschau') drive people's political participation and civic engagement -- in ways that commercial news media do not. Public Broadcasting News (PBN) also contribute to people's political knowledge and their support for democratic values, two key foundations of any (truly) democratic society.
That's what Dr. Kai Manke and Prof. Dr. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau from Münster’s Marketing Center report in a new Working Paper based on a large-scale survey study that is representative for the German population. In their empirical analyses, they account for potential endogeneity and alternative explanations by including an extensive set of media factors and by using a two-step residual regression approach, which assigns all ‘shared’ variance between controls and PBN usage. Thus, if someone lays hands on PBN budgets (a demand by many conservatives, libertarians, and also far-right politicians), that would hurt the democracy's functioning, according to the authors’ findings.
But Dr. Manke and Prof. Hennig-Thurau also find that there's a catch: Results vary strongly between media channels! Democratic behaviors and attitudes of older people are affected only by PBN through linear TV and smartphone apps in their research. In contrast, younger people are only affected by PBN via their social media posts. Thus, restricting public media to linear formats would cut PBN and its democracy-fostering effects off from younger audiences.
And there's one more thing the Münster researchers finds: Only linear TV contributes to people's political knowledge. Their results indicate that no nonlinear format does. Thus PBN, while contributing to younger people's values and democratic behaviors (via nonlinear media), do not have a path to their political knowledge. For those who believe in the power of knowledge for a functioning democracy, that might be quite an important challenge.
Download the working paper via SSRN (free and open access):