An international survey on how much, or how little, people across 46 countries value the journalism provided by public service broadcasters (PSBs) has put Finnish Broadcasting Company, Yle at the top of the list.
Nearly 90 per cent of the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford survey respondents in Finland said they considered the news provided by Yle to be either very or fairly reliable, compared to 85 per cent in the previous survey.
Only three per cent said they considered Yle’s news content to be “very unreliable”.
Among respondents who revealed their own political party allegiances, supporters of the Centre Party, National Coalition Party (NCP), Social Democratic Party, Left Alliance and Green Party were in the same range of between 84 and 89 per cent on how important publicly funded news sources were to society.
Only around 65 per cent of Finns Party voters, however, said they thought that publicly funded news services were very or fairly important to society.
The NCP and the Finns Party, part of the newly-created Finnish Coalition Government, have proposed cutting Yle’s funding by up to a quarter.
Researcher at the University of Tampere, Esa Reunanen said the proposed cuts might reflect increased criticism by private media companies who blame public service broadcasters for unfair competition in the digital world “combined with a more politically-driven right-wing criticism targeted at Yle’s news”.
Helsinki, 20 June 2023
