Policymakers in industrialized democracies often debate the efficacy of subsidizing public broadcasters. Surprisingly however, past media and politics research analyzing the effects of public broadcasting on political knowledge does not isolate the effect of subsidies and instead treats all public broadcasters as equals. This study theorizes that subsidized public broadcasters have to worry less about competing with entertainment-oriented commercial broadcasters for advertising revenue than their unsubsidized peers. As a result, they can focus on providing more comprehensive public affairs coverage instead of only worrying about attracting the largest possible audience. To test this theory, I use Eurobarometer data measuring knowledge, media consumption, and demographic variables from 14 countries. I find that watching public broadcasting increases knowledge levels among citizens, while decreasing gaps in knowledge between citizens caused by varying levels of education, income, gender, and political interest. However, as predicted, these benefits only occur in countries that provide significant subsidies for their public broadcasters.

In this paper it is argued that the concept of pluralism – the most important value in the Italian media debate – is conceptually confused. The author identifies three mutually incompatible conceptions of pluralism used when discussing the public broadcaster Rai: (1) structural pluralism, satisfied when the public broadcaster is divided into autonomous channels or programme groups; (2) summative pluralism, satisfied when output is divided between political actors according to some ideal distribution; and (3) pluralism ‘lottizzato’, satisfied when a number of different political positions are ‘represented’ by journalists within the broadcaster.