Dragomir: It's Time for Public Media to Take Their Audience Seriously

In his latest piece for the MediaPowerMonitor, Director of CMDS, Marius Dragomir writes about the current state of public media funding and its challenges, most notably regarding the license fee that's increasingly being criticized by taxpayers.

As Dragomir writes, "funding for the public media declined in 2015 compared to the year 2011 in some 40% of the countries part of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), a club of public media organizations, mainly from Europe. In concrete terms, public media budgets saw a combined cut of approximately €1.78bn (US$1.87bn). Public media organizations are predominantly publicly funded. In 2015, over three quarters of the public media budgets in the EBU area came from public sources. The license fee, like the tax that Ms Baumert didn’t want to pay, remains the main source of cash for public media. Over two-thirds of the total funding in the EBU area was generated through the license fee in 2015. People had to pay this fee in more than half of the 56 EBU countries, which includes all of Europe, some countries from the former Soviet Union and some of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region".

Read the article here.