Introduction

Public 1: A Civil Public of Citizens

In ideal circumstances public service journalism, which conceives of itself as speaking to a public of citizens inhabiting a robust civil sphere and which is publicly funded, is best described as a type of merit good. Merit goods are a response to arguments about market failures (Brevini, 2013; Davies, 2004; Feintuck & Varney, 2006; Levy, 2013) whereby goods that are beneficial to the public (Brevini, 2013) would not necessarily be produced without interventions in markets. In conventional economic terms, a merit good can be understood as a service whose value and worth is greater than the value and worth an individual places upon it. Such goods then bring some form of beneficial civil power to produce optimal improvements (of some kind) for all. Consequently, merit goods have intrinsic properties that are regarded as producing desired outcomes even if individuals dispute the cost of supporting these outcomes. Examples abound: publicly funded health care, art galleries, museums, libraries and, particularly relevant to public service journalism, public service media. In the case of public funding for public service journalism the desired outcomes hinge on the view that such journalism can generate civil benefits. These are usually described in cultural and political terms (Curran et al., 2009). The former is to be found under the rubric of culture, education and information, and the latter is to be found under the rubric of holding state and market power to account. In both cases the public are viewed as citizens whose citizenship is enhanced by knowing and understanding events in the world and by being enabled (by knowing and understanding “what is going on”) to take part in what has been variously described as “public opinion,” the “voice of public opinion,” the “formation of public opinion” “public will formation,” “public reason,” “will of the people,” the “democratic will” or the “democratic voice.” In short, public service journalism serves the “court of public opinion,” or an ongoing “public opinion tribunal.”¹⁶ According to this view, public service journalism is to be held in high esteem because it can be trusted as a provider of information that enables well-informed decisions to be arrived at, which should then go on to limit the predatory powers of the market and to influence the formation and roll-out of government policy.¹⁷ That is, it is viewed as a fundamental aspect of democratic life and as such must be publicly funded and supported. All of this assumes that there is a certain way of going about producing the desired outcomes that can be followed and adhered to. Both in principle and in fact there is such a way, although it is frequently stated to be unachievable and/or implausible: it consists of an intention to be truth-telling and the taking of a rigorous, fair, and objective approach to researching and reporting the news.

For Williams (2002), accuracy and sincerity are the core virtues of truth. Constative accuracy is the virtue of reporting how things are only when the report is the outcome of sufficient investigation—a sentiment expressed by public service journalists, who argue that objective reporting is the best method to ensure that all facts and issues are fairly considered, weighed up and scrutinized. Achieving constative accuracy in any investigation “lies in the skills and attitudes that resist the pleasure principle, in all its forms, from a gross need to believe the agreeable, to mere laziness in checking one’s investigations” (Williams, 2002). It is a “passion for getting it right” (Williams, 2002) and in relation to public service journalism, “getting it right” relies upon the public service journalist’s desire and ability to do so. The extent to which the public service journalist pursues accuracy is dependent upon what Williams refers to as “attitudes, desires and wishes, the spirit of his attempts, the care that he takes” and “the methods that the investigator uses” (Williams, 2002, p. 127); that is, the news journalist achieves accuracy through an effective investigation of contemporary events, which balances the desire for truthfulness with an ethical justification of the methods that are used. Interpretive sincerity, as part of truth-telling, is the virtue of communicating only how you take things to be (Blackburn, 2007). Sincerity, according to Williams, implies that people say what they believe to be true and is “centred on sustaining and developing relations with others that involve different kinds and degrees of trust.” (Williams, 2002, p. 121). At the very least this involves public service journalists expressing what they actually believe to be truthful in the news report. It is “trustworthiness in speech,” and by extension, in the written text or the online text. It is the disposition “to make sure that any assertion one makes expresses a genuine belief” (Williams, 2002, p. 91) that can be substantiated by verifiable evidence.

Accompanying truth-telling in public service journalism is a question of objectivity. Simply expressed, public service journalism is objective when it self-consciously adopts the professional method of objective and fair¹⁸ reporting which, when undertaken rigorously, meets certain professional procedural standards. These are standards which the public can legitimately regard as being aimed at an intention to discover the truth and which can also sensibly be regarded as trustworthy because they are motivated by an a concern for fairness and an “obligation not to deceive.”¹⁹ Such procedural standards should not then be discounted because of epistemological confusions or despairing claims with regard to how far from truth-telling modern news journalism has descended; nor from a view unwittingly supported by a belief in some academic quarters that objectivity is impossible,²⁰ is one theoretical option amongst others,²¹ or is a form of delusional professional “myth.” Objectivity, in the context of public service journalism, is quite simply the application of professional standards which support the reasonable expectation that newsgathering and reporting are undertaken in accordance with some form of “methodological rigor.”²² For example, the objective aspects of newsgathering occur when all views and opinions that can be gathered are gathered, when all facts that can be known are accurately reported, and when their explanatory value is weighed or judged in an impartial way.²³ This form of objectivity carries with it an interest in the truth (and not deception)²⁴ and an attempt to apply a disciplined professional method where views and evidence are not misrepresented or suppressed because they do not suit an opinion already held by the reporter, or the news organization, or would upset their customers, possibly causing them to reject their news supplier.

Increasingly it is argued that the reality of publicly funded public service journalism is that it needs, or has been forced, to adapt or change in accordance with anti-democratic politics (Hutton, 2023) and digital technology (Viner, 2016).²⁵ Hutton describes the threat to democracy through what he calls a “culture of truth denial,” while Viner contextualizes the challenges of digital technology with the question, “[D]oes the truth matter anymore?” This is not so much an epistemological question as a practical one concerning the way traditional conceptions of journalism, especially public service journalism that places investigative effort and truthfulness at its heart, are being undermined. Viner (2016) puts the matter so: “When a fact begins to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and ‘facts’ that are not.” Accordingly, “when ‘facts don’t work,’” that is, when they carry no persuasive power to affect prior beliefs, and “voters don’t trust the media, [because] everyone believes in their own ‘truth,’” “the results . . . can be devastating” (Viner, 2016). Accordingly,

we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob.

(Viner, 2016)

The problem is not just a world of recycled false information believed in by gullible or innocent others, but of “echo chambers” where like-minded people only hear the views of like-minded people (Sunstein, 2007, 2009), where people never hear alternative views, where established facts and objective truths are simply denied and replaced by views designed to be approved by core followers. All of this has, for Viner (2016), meant that “many news organisations have steered themselves away from public-interest journalism and toward junk-food news, chasing page views in the vain hope of attracting clicks and advertising (or investment).”

Public 2: A Public of Consumers

Most media markets around the world are mixed in the sense that they consist of some element of either publicly funded or not-for-profit public service journalism that coexists alongside dominant, multinational, privately owned media conglomerates that supply news as well as other products and services. These media conglomerates usually argue that they try to balance some form of public service obligation (no matter how thin) with regard to their news services with their fundamental commercial imperatives. That is, the two—commerce and public interest—can cohabit in a pluralistic setting and serve the cause of media pluralism, maximizing the diversity of commentary and opinions to public and democratic advantage.²⁶ It is the case that, in observing commercial imperatives combined with perceived opportunities for meeting them due to new technological developments and opportunities, that the circumstances that threaten public service journalism are being heightened. In other words, the argument that public service journalism is being undermined (and abandoned) in the face of a culture of truth denial (Hutton, 2023) and digital technological challenges (increasingly, AI) cannot be separated from the commercial imperatives that seek to dominate a mixed media market. The most important commercial imperative of all for media conglomerates (and which drives one of the basic ways to achieve the maximization of profits) is the view that the public should be regarded as a public of consumers with clearly delineated consumer rights and consumer freedoms. It is these consumer rights and freedoms that are paramount and provide the rationale for the pursuit of commercial imperatives. In short, it is the consumer and not the citizen who is sovereign and the “ethic of consumption”²⁷ is her rule.²⁸

The rationale for treating the public as consumers is not to diminish them but to adorn every consumer with certain unconditional rights and corresponding freedoms. The first right is freedom of choice; the second right is freedom of speech and with that freedom from censorship. On this view “speech is simply another commodity, to be chosen by consumers subject to the forces of supply and demand” (Sunstein, 2007, p. 216). Justifying these rights and freedoms is a matter of combining an intellectual mélange of neoliberal economics, carrying its attendant philosophical beliefs in personal autonomy and possessive individualism, with a libertarian distrust of most (if not all) forms of (media) regulation. This combination, coupled with First Amendment jurisprudence of the most fundamental kind, brings with it an expansionist view of tolerance whereby offensive views that have the net effect of diminishing a person’s civil standing (Waldron, 2012) are protected by the application of the First Amendment, and are not regarded as being slanderous or libelous (at either an individual or group level). This mix provides a carapace under which the consumer is protected from “interference.” In short, powerful intellectual arguments are used to defend market-based and commercially inspired news suppliers. It is here that such suppliers find one aspect of their public service justification, namely giving the consumers what they want. In the case of public service journalism, the consuming public are simply choosing what they want to know about based upon the following strong distinction: (a) the consumer, who resides in the commercial domain, is market-based, economically determined, individualistic, and regards news content in all forms as capable of being purchased and owned; (b) the citizen, who resides in the public domain, regards certain content as a social and civil asset which should be available to all, sees communication infrastructures as adding to the cultural fabric of collective identity and belonging, requires that certain civil functions are fulfilled by broadcasters, and believes that the public purse and not the personal purse should bear the cost of such a service.

At this point we return to the argument that public service journalism is not a commodity governed by commercial imperatives, but a merit good, and that consumers do not always choose what is best for them, nor do aggregated individuals want necessarily to produce desirable public outcomes. The question is, who is to adjudicate the claim and counterclaim as to (a) what the public is entitled to, (b) what the public want, and (c) what is in the public good and for public benefit? In the setting of the mixed market (i.e., where there is at least a notional commitment to the provision of public service journalism) there exists a variety of regulatory regimes, from strongly interventionist to decidedly passive, and attempts to document them simply end up in describing ideal types. The point here is that regulatory adjudication as a means of protecting/promoting public service journalism is not the complete answer: although where guided by public interest criteria, as say distinct from competition criteria (as the EU is),²⁹ it is certainly an important part of the answer.

Rather, it is the case that the challenge of protecting and promoting public service journalism in the mixed market lies elsewhere. As Viner (2016) notes, “the challenge for journalism today is not simply technological innovation or the creation of new business models. It is to establish what role journalistic organizations still play in a public discourse that has become impossibly fragmented and radically destabilised.” If we disregard the exaggeration with regard to public discourse,³⁰ her point is that a mixed media market should develop “a business model that serves and rewards media organizations that put the search for truth at the heart of everything—building an informed, active public that scrutinizes the powerful, not an ill-informed, reactionary gang that attacks the vulnerable. Traditional news values must be embraced and celebrated: reporting, verifying, gathering together eyewitness statements, making a serious attempt to discover what really happened” (Viner, 2016).³¹ In other words, public service journalism with its distinctive features, as outlined above, needs to be more than just publicly financed, and protected/promoted by regulation; it needs to have its marketplace where it can maintain a new form of commercial role that preserves and promotes its civil role: one which entails that the people it serves are not regarded as consumers but as citizens.

The question now is that if economic challenges facing public service journalism can be understood in terms of a clash between public service values and commercial imperatives and priorities, what happens to public service journalism if news organizations come to regard themselves as serving a set of political beliefs? And hence come to see their public as consisting of political allies and as partisans in a struggle against those who do not share their political outlook?

Public 3: A Public of Partisans

A passionate journalism, a patriotic journalism, a journalism of resistance, campaigning journalism, message journalism, and even crusading journalism are all regular features of the history of journalism, and in some cases they have served “their” cause whilst retaining their truth-telling role, or as much of it as was possible. Recently however, there has arisen the view in some news organizations that their audience consists of a public of partisans, and everyone not of their party is a member of an occupying army that must be resisted. Closely related to this position is the related view that truth-telling based on public service journalism precepts is less important than holding correct beliefs and/or not collaborating with the occupying enemy. In essence, the world consists of friends and foes. Accordingly, some news journalists on these partisan channels see their role as consisting of nothing other than the straightforward advocacy of a particular political outlook, or of supporting a particular politician. The American channel, Fox News, and the UK’s GB News are often cited as preeminent examples of a partisan news channel, though there are many others around the world: variously chauvinistic, populist, nationalist, or seeking to redress the perceived bias of the “Western Liberal” global media that dominates the modern news media ecology, all claiming to be serving their own tribe that is their selective public.

The emergence of these partisan channels has been put down to a variety of reasons, notably politics itself has become less consensual, politicians themselves have debased public discourse and the media reflects this, technology has facilitated the proliferation of opportunities for extreme views to be disseminated and regulators have failed to moderate what is said. The view taken by partisan channels is that politics and the public sphere are in an endless set of antagonistic relationships and, correspondingly, sides need to be taken. The net result of this is that “facts” are constantly disputed and substituted by “alternative facts,” or “our facts”³² and attempts at discursive rationality are deemed pointless.

Carl Schmitt (2007) who did much to show the inexorably antagonistic nature of politics, argued that partisanship can be seen as an aspect of political enmity that takes one of two forms: (a) reclaiming something lost or believed to have been stolen, typically land; and (b) undertaking to obliterate ideas and views held to be anathema to a way of life understood in highly particularistic terms. Transposing these two conceptions of enmity (which Schmitt calls “real” and “absolute”), it is possible to say that a partisan media consists of the following four criteria:

As Schmitt (2007, p. 90) observed: “in enmity a person who has lost his right seeks to regain it, in enmity he finds the meaning of his cause and the meaning of right when the framework of protection and obedience within which he formerly lived breaks up.”

Applying these four criteria, we see that partisan news is the antithesis of public service journalism, and, according to some, its greatest threat. Partisan news accuses public service journalism of being hypocritical for merely being an ideological extension of some self-serving dominant hegemony that values the status quo or values antithetical to the partisan, a charge that has more recently become conflated with the accusation that public service media is increasingly “woke” (Goodwin, 2023). To compensate for this bias against the partisan and to use the jargon of the American “alt right,” the media has to become “weaponized”³⁴ in order to serve a populist politics replete with their own illiberal (or non-woke) ideas. Overall, a weaponized media feeds a partisan public “fake news,”³⁵ conspiracy theories, and distortions (sometimes lies). At the same time trustworthiness is disconnected from truth telling, fairness, objectivity, and investigative rigor and is replaced by the endlessly recurring explicit commitments the news provider makes to representing its audience, their beliefs, and their values. The relationship between the news provider and the partisan public is adjudged to be symbiotic—mutually beneficial. Partisan news providers give succor to whomever they support by trying to use the news to confirm a person’s outlook or to channel and reinforce discontent in a certain direction. They do both by reinforcing or seeking to influence what Schutz and Luckmann (1973) call a person’s “natural attitude” and the way that they understand the world.³⁶ It is nothing other than a totalizing approach to news where everything must conform to a specific ideology or worldview, and what does not is simply ignored (edited out); always working toward promoting a “single common good” and for a leader “whose will cannot err” (Müller, 2016, p. 101).

In serving their agenda, partisan news channels and the partisan public constantly evoke the sacrality of the First Amendment, their unconditional attachment to freedom of speech and expression, and the people’s right to know. The result of regarding the people as consisting of only two types, friends and foes, and politics and civil life based on the crude distinction “friend” or “foe,” is that a partisan public requires the proliferation of views which merely reinforce prejudice, since the like-minded ultimately only wish to speak and listen to the like-minded. This proliferation represents a sustained attempt to diminish the quality and scope of public discourse and to dispute the value of public service journalism (or as the alt right put it, “to attack the messenger”). The net result is a news ecology that is febrile.

Public Service Journalism as Virtuous Resistance

Thus far the description of public service journalism has focused on how it should be undertaken and the two great threats (commercial and political) that, if left unchallenged, will diminish it. Which leaves a rather obvious question unaddressed: specifically, what normative guidelines and values determine the actual content of public service journalism? That is, what principles of news selection circumscribe news selection? Harrison (2006, p. 101) after McQuail (2000) argues that

Expressed in this form the list represents a series of moral or normative aspirations on what the setting of news journalism should be, how it should report contemporary events and what the outcome of these reports should be.³⁷ In short, the list represents the ideal news ecology or environment.

In an article for the Huffington Post (Grenoble, 2018), Cass Sunstein is cited to make the case that responsible news media should be aware of three problems arising from the growth of misinformation that can be overcome by ensuring that: “First, citizens should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance.” For Sunstein, such “serendipity is a good thing. Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself.” Being exposed to a range of ideas, perspectives and opinions that have not been deliberately searched for may in fact be annoying to people, but may also have an impact and perhaps even “change their lives in fundamental ways.” In an era of “fragmentation, polarization, and extremism,” echo chambers exacerbate views rather than challenge them. Sunstein’s second problem focuses on the idea that citizens should have “a wide range of common experiences” because “without shared experiences, a heterogeneous society will have a much more difficult time in addressing social problems. People might see each other as strangers, foreigners, possibly even enemies. Common experiences, emphatically including the common experiences made possible by social media, provide a form of social glue. Societies need such things.”³⁸ Third, it is important that citizens should be able to make distinctions “between truth and falsehood—and to know when democratic processes are being manipulated.” He goes on to say that “in democracies, of course, it is fair for people to disagree about what the truth is. But if people are knowingly spreading lies, and if nations are attempting to disrupt other nations, some process should be in place to enable citizens to have access to the truth.”

Ultimately, these suggestions are attempts to describe practical editorial guidelines that serve democratic outcomes via a form of trustworthiness.³⁹ That is, news organizations are trusted with accurately, sincerely, and objectively reporting those events deemed to be newsworthy. Selecting something to be newsworthy and then reporting it accurately is a matter of editorial integrity. It is the exercise of freedom of expression responsibly and fairly undertaken. Only then can a public warrant of trustworthiness be secured. While this might sound somewhat high-minded, it needs to be made clear (if only in the name of economic realism) that the citizen and the public conceived of as consumers can, in fact, overlap.

Conceiving of the public as consisting of consumers does not undermine public service journalism in the way that conceiving of the public as consisting of partisans does. The former can and does provide the conditions of coexistence. Private sector news suppliers are not necessarily inimical to public service journalism, nor is it always regarded by the private sector as an expensive indulgence, indeed the marque “trustworthy” is showing itself to be a valuable and marketable commodity⁴⁰ and the search for new business models of coexistence is ongoing. The latter, however, has be addressed for what it is—straightforwardly, an anathema to public service journalism’s values. It is not so because public service journalism necessarily comes with an attachment to progressive political values; indeed, public service journalism can equally be conservative. Rather, it is because public service journalism cannot lose sight of the value of trying to be truthful, basing comment and opinions on what is sincerely believed to be truthful and at the same time being accurate and homologous to the world. Only by the activity of winning public trust and by securing a public warrant can public service journalism claim its privileged status. As technology companies who provide news services are finding out, once trust is lost it is very difficult to regain it.⁴¹ This is not to deny the benefits that technology companies bring to news services, but as Viner (2016) reminds us, engagement with people as civic actors is to engage with them as a public of citizens, and this is at the heart of public service journalism and is the way in which it offers a form of virtuous resistance to the predatory circumstance of commercial and political power. Ultimately, then, public service journalism is a methodical way of undertaking journalism in accordance with the demands of its public, which is conceived of as primarily consisting of discursive and intelligent citizens who believe themselves to have a right to know.