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With the emergence of networked issue communities, citizen journalist blogs, nonprofit news sites, and the spontaneous viral sharing of information and campaigns, one could claim that there already exists public media de facto, complementing and perhaps even duplicating some functions of institutional public media de jure. In many mature PSM countries, the debate about public service media entails claims how those institutions now distort free media markets. In addition, the commercialization of the legacy and online media landscape is diminishing the original public service ethos of serving the citizens. And yet, given the viral disinformation, as well as both government and corporate control of the media, it would seem that the role of public service media is ever more important, both for existing countries with public service institutions, and for nations building their democratic media systems.

Defined as a public good, in the first half of the 20th century (see in this issue Andrijašević, pp. 23-40), public service broadcasting kept its legitimacy through national legislatives at first, and later through the directives of the European Commission. According to Tyler Cowen (1992) public goods have two aspects: nonexcludability and nonrivalrous consumption. Especially today, because of digital technology and the digital switchover that was applied to majority of PSM televisions in Europe, there are many ways to consume PSM services as a ‘free rider’–without paying the license fee. On the other hand, because of the ‘digital divide,’a large number of citizens do not have access to PSM services online. Therefore, the relevance of the argument for PSM as …