A (0:00)

Well, hello and welcome to this first public lecture of this academic year. A public lecture put on by the Department of Media and Communications. And I'm very pleased to see so many people here. My name is Sonia Livingstone, I'm a professor in the department and I'm chairing this evening's talk. Can I just check that you can hear me in the back? Yeah, okay, I thought I'll do that rather than ask our speaker to do the sound check. The format of the evening is that I'll introduce our speaker who will talk for around about 50 minutes and then there will be time for questions. So please be getting your questions at the ready. And then before everyone rushes off, I'd like to say that there's going to be a reception in the senior dining room, to which everyone is very welcome. And that will be. That's on the fifth floor of the main building of the lse, which is pretty much at the entrance opposite this building. So there will be a drink. So I'm very pleased to welcome for this lecture speaker for today, Professor James Curran. Professor Curran is Director of the Goldsmith Media Research Program. He's professor of Communications at Goldsmiths University of London and he has written or edited 18 books in media communication addressing issues in political economy, media history, media theory. I think many people here are familiar with many of those books. Some of them have them in many editions as a new edition comes out. They include, notably, Power Without Responsibility, Media and Power, Mass Media and Society, Culture Wars, De Westernizing Media Studies, Contesting Media Power, Media and Cultural Theory, and more. I shan't read them all. Through his very impressive career, Professor Curran has explored the ways in which media organisations have evolved over time. He's explored the market and economic structures that have shaped ME media output. And he's examined the ways in which the media relate to and influence social processes in society. He has a very exciting and ambitious topic for today. He's going to talk on the title Global Media Systems, Public Knowledge and Democracy. And I would ask you to welcome him.

B (2:42)

Can I just check that you can hear me at the back? I might say Sonia is a friend of mine, which is why there was such a friendly introduction. Any survey of the media around the world could look at different things. It could draw attention to the emergence of a propaganda war between Islam and the West. Or it could look at the cumulative trend towards less government control of the media. Or it could explore how the Internet, mobile phones and new developments such as metadata systems are restructuring communications around the world. Or it could survey yet again the debate about whether globalization is promoting cultural uniformity or heterogeneity. This last, as you know, has tended to monopolize the attention of the field, with one increasingly beleaguered set of scholars arguing that media globalization is fostering cultural imperialism, by which they mean the promotion of consumerism, individualism, American style infotainment and unequal flows of communication between developed and developing countries. Another tradition seeks to rebut these charges by pointing to the media self sufficiency of populous nations like India and China, the rise of indigenous centres of media production from Taiwan to Brazil, the so called domestication of global media formats, the creative autonomy of local audiences drawing on diverse cultures, and as a logical extension of these arguments, maintaining that media globalization is a myth. This last advance and rather good recent book by Harvitz. Instead I want to make the case for looking at something quite different, but still central to making sense of how media systems of the world are changing. During the last 25 years there has been a tectonic shift in the way in which the media around the globe organized. Four key changes have occurred, all of which make the market more central to the operation of the media. First, individual publicly owned broadcasting organizations have been privatised in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, France, Mexico and Spain, to mention only some of the places where this has happened. Second, there has been an enormous expansion in the number of commercially owned television channels as a consequence of market liberalization. This has changed the character of television, especially in parts of the world like Europe and Asia, where there was once a strong public television tradition. Thus, in the early 1980s, public television channels outnumbered private ones by a ratio of 10 to 1 in Western Europe. Yet by the end of the 20th century, major private channels outnumber public ones, and this is before hundreds of small audience commercial channels on European cable and satellite TV are taken into account. Third, there has been a movement towards the deregulation of commercial television, that is the relaxation of positive program requirements designed to further the public good. Their effect has been to make former public service commercial channels more oriented towards providing whatever is most profitable. Fourth, most public broadcasters are in decline. Their audiences have eroded greatly so in some countries like Canada and Australia, and they are increasingly beleaguered, being exposed to budget cuts or being compelled to seek funding from commercial sources, or both, as in the case of Dordeshan in India. These cumulative pressures have tended to make public broadcasters more like their commercial rivals. These four interrelated changes privatization, market liberalization, deregulation and the weakening of public broadcasters have resulted in an historic shift in the functioning of television. This shift can be summarized as a reorientation of television systems away from being audiences as citizens towards seeing them as consumers. It can also be characterized as a global shift towards the market centered model of US Television, an argument advanced by Hallen and Mancini, Chadha and Kavouri, among others. While this change and its underlying causes have all been well documented, the consequences remain under researched. The main theme of the relevant literature is that the political world is being forced to adapt to the increased entertainment orientation of more market driven media systems, leading to a cumulative Hollywoodization of politics. This has given rise to a subsidiary debate about whether politicians ought to entertain citizens in order to reconnect to the public, to which the answer given by Van Zoonen and others is a qualified yes. But the cumulative changes in the organization and orientation of television may have more far reaching consequences than are addressed in this narrowly defined research. Television commercialization may be reducing the prominence given to public affairs and fostering soft news reporting in a way that is promoting political ignorance and making it easier for governments and political elites to manipulate the public. There is in fact very little systematic information about how the diet on which democracy feeds in different parts of the world is changing. We simply don't know what is happening. This prompts the obvious question as to why our field, churning out as it does countless publications on cultural globalization, should have left us so much in the dark. Here let me take a brief detour by offering three possible explanations. The first is that the prevailing neoliberal ascendancy makes media commercialization appear relatively unproblematic and therefore not something worth prioritizing in terms of research. Almost without us realizing it, valorization of the market has entered the bloodstream of media and cultural studies. Consider for a moment recent publications in Latin American media studies. Sally Hughes proclaims in a recent book that intensified market pressures played a significant part in transforming the Mexican media, and in particular television, from being a collusive institution sustaining an authoritarian regime to becoming during the 1990s and early 2000s, a pluralistic hybrid system. Similarly, Carolina Matos, in a forthcoming book to be published by Lixm, place even greater stress on the role of the market during the 1980s and 1990s in propelling the media from the official orbit of power. In Brazil, the theme is the same the market, though not without problems, is an engine of media freedom. Comparable arguments are to be found in Asian media research, for example, in recent studies of the development of the media in Hong Kong and Indonesia. Or take a completely different area of research, British press history. The orthodox interpretation typified by the work of Hannah Barker, the daughter, incidentally, of a current LSE professor, is that the growth of unlicensed newspapers in the 18th century cast a low wattage light on the previously private aristocratic world of politics, rendering it more visible and accountable. How spectators outside the political system reacted to this new information began to matter because their reaction formed the basis of public opinion. Newspapers, Barker also argues that championed public opinion because this was the way to thrive in a competitive market. The market, in her now standard account, was thus an engine of popular power, putting the people at the center of politics. Or consider critical American TV studies, where market thinking often set the limits of what it is possible to contemplate. For example, Todd Giplin concludes his brilliant Inside Primetime with the warning that the formal structure of a non commercial television system along European lines offers no real solution. James Hamilton ends his groundbreaking work all the Television News that's Fit to Sell a Good Title with the tame recommendation that non profit organizations should subsidize the production and distribution of public information. Similarly, Geneva Overhozas recently issued a report on the crisis of American journalism outlining a series of ineffectual proposals from the voluntary ring fencing of editorial budgets to the involvement of wealthy foundations in fostering good journalism. Foundations are America's equivalent of aristocratic patrons, and the call on the Ford and Annenberg bequests as saviors is like turning to the Medici family for help, essentially an early modern solution. Common to all these critical approaches is acceptance of the market, informed by an aversion to involving the state in the structural design of the media. If the influence of neoliberalism is one reason for failing to investigate adequately the global consequences of TV commercialization, another is blind faith in the redemptive power of new communications technology. The dimation of news and current affairs on some general television channels is being offset, it's argued, by the rise of specialized news channels, blogs, and public affairs websites. This is something I will address more directly in a moment, but in passing. Perhaps some evidence should be introduced into this discussion, which tends to be distorted distorted by personal subjective experience. Pew found that only 6% of people use blogs as political sources of information during the last U.S. presidential campaign, Lou Sodi and Ward discovered that only 3% of British adults during the last general election use the Internet as our main source of information. And Jeremy Tunstall records that the audience for the leading specialized news channel, cnn, in European countries like the Netherlands and Britain is so small as to be almost unmeasurable. This said New Communications technology is changing things, and this introduces a deterrent element of uncertainty about the consequences of changes in old media. The third explanation has to do with arguments that have become prominent in cultural studies. These can be briefly summarized in a few sentences. Once it is recognized that politics is personal, then it becomes obvious that it is argued that much entertainment is also political because it provides a public forum for examining and debating prevailing social relationships. Media entertainment also offers a way of exploring, expressing and debating social values and social identity. Both social media, central to contemporary politics and of course, media entertainment also projects pictures of the world, alternative ways of interpreting and explaining the dynamics of society, something that two generations of political scientists have largely neglected. Even though entertainment is what most people consume most of the time in their media encounters. These are typical cultural studies arguments. Iconoclastic in our rhetoric and reassuring in their conclusions, they both attack the received wisdom and offer a way of validating the fountain of entertainment generated by increasing media commercialization. At this point I have a confession to make. I found myself developing and championing these last arguments in a public lecture I gave last year in America and repeated this year in Japan, and indeed, very nearly repeated here. Since I haven't given this lecture in Britain, I thought to myself, Sonia Livingston, she would never repeat a lecture. She would rise to the occasion. So this is what I've sought to do. The lecture that I didn't give kind of work because it was supported by very entertaining excerpts from Sex and the City and the film Chocolat. But in this lecture, which may not work, I'm about to contest the thrust of these arguments and for entertainment, doing something wrong. And for entertainment I will offer tables of statistics, though with some difficulty. I've rationed these before. So far I have advanced rather circuitously the claim that an historic change is taking place in media systems around the globe that warrants more serious investigation. This thought prompted a group of us, myself, Shanta Ian Gart, Ankur Brink Lund and Inka Salavara Morin and Aid the assisted by my temporary research assistant Sharon Cohen, to explore in a project partly co funded by the esrc, the connections between the architecture of media systems, what is reported and what is known in four countries. If Sonia Livingstone is right in saying that the Internet has not fundamentally transformed societies, and she is, the Internet may yet reconfigure media studies by making it enormously easier to do comparative research. I cannot compete with Peter Lunt, who wrote, I think, two academic articles with a beautiful Scandinavian academic without ever having met her. But it only proved necessary for our group to meet once in order to complete our comparative survey, the results of which are reported here for the first time in a study which I found steep learning curve, we chose four economically advanced learning liberal democracies that represent three distinct media systems an unreconstructed public service model exemplified by Finland and Denmark a dual system that combines increasingly deregulated commercial television media with strong broadcasters Britain and the exemplar market model of the United States. Let me say a bit the seats here if you're brave enough to come and walk down here. The American model is based on market forces with minimum interference by the state. America's media are overwhelmingly in private hands. Its public service television, PBS, is under resourced and accounts for less than 2% of audience share. Regulation of commercial broadcasting by the Federal Communications Commission has become increasingly light touch, meaning that American media are essentially entrepreneurial actors who strive to satisfy consumer demand. But this picture of a commercialized media system is complicated by the existence of a social responsibility tradition among American journalists emphasizing the need to inform the public, a tradition which is strongly embedded in an oligopolistic press and, to a lesser extent, network news. However, this tradition is weakening in the face of increasing competition from new channels and websites. In the context of a society which has a long history of disinterest in foreign affairs and in which a large section of the population is disconnected from public life, this has led to an extensive closure of foreign news bureaus and the growth of soft journalism, exemplified by the rise of local TV news programs centered on crime, calamities, and accidents. In stark contrast to the US System, the traditional public service model represented by Finland and Denmark deliberately seeks to influence audience behavior through a framework of public law and subsidy. The core assumption is that citizens need to be adequately exposed to public affairs programming if they are to cast informed votes, hold government to account, and be properly empowered. This results in generous subsidies for public broadcasters, which helps in turn to ensure that they secure large audiences. In Finland, the two main public television channels had a 44% share of viewing time in 2005. In Denmark, their equivalents had an even higher share of 64% in 2006. The public interest argument also results in positive program obligations being imposed on terrestrial commercial television channels enforced by a public regulator. This public service model thus embraces both the public and commercial broadcast sectors. Britain represents a media system somewhere in between the pure market, US and pure public service models exemplified by Denmark and Finland. On the one hand, Britain's flagship broadcasting organization, the BBC, is the largest best resourced public broadcaster in the world and retains a large audience. The BBC's two principal channels, along with publicly owned Channel 4 accounted for 43% of viewing time in Britain in 2006. On the other hand, the principal satellite broadcaster BSKYB was allowed to develop in a largely unregulated form and the principal terrestrial commercial channel ITV was sold in a public auction during the 1990s and its public obligations, although still significant, were lightened. This move towards the deregulation of commercial television had major consequences, some of which are only now becoming apparent. Between 1988 and 1998 the foreign coverage of ITV's current affairs programs halved. By 2005 its factual international program would drop below that of any other terrestrial channel. The more uncompromising commercial orientation of ITV had a knock on effect on other broadcasters, most noticeably on the BBC, where there was a softening of news values. By contrast with broadcasting, there is a greater affinity between the newspapers of the four countries since these are unregulated and overwhelmingly commercial and enterprises. Competition is constrained in the U.S. denmark and Finland by the development of extensive monopolies in a still dominant press. However, the rise of the metro phenomenon of free distribution daily papers has fueled competition in both Scandinavian countries. Denmark has free directly competing national dailies and a tabloid tradition of and Parliament's press. These features are accentuated in Britain where there are 10 directly competing daily titles in a sharply contracting market in decline since 1957. Overall, the differences between the media systems of the four countries are now less pronounced than they once were, but the remains nonetheless a significant contrast between the American television model, which is geared primarily towards satisfying consumer demand, and the public service television systems in Finland, Denmark and to a lesser degree Britain, which give greater priority to satisfying informed citizenship. In order to investigate whether this made a difference, we undertook a content analysis of the main news programs of the two principal television channels and of the news reported in a sample of papers in the four countries. In the uk for example, we took the circulation leaders of the upscale mid scale and downscale sectors of the national press and won regular data. Each news source was monitored for a period of four non sequential weeks in February to April 2007 this year. Central to our analysis was a distinction between hard and soft news. As a first step, we defined all news reports about topics such as politics, public administration, the economy and science as potentially hard, while news concern with celebrities, entertainment and sport was classified as potentially soft. The second phase of classification was based on mode of treatment. In particular, all news reports on either soft or hard topic Areas that were framed in terms of the public good or raised issues about public policy and administration were defined as hard. Thus, news reports of the early initial release from prison of the celebrity heiress Paris Hilton, framed in terms of whether there is equality of justice in America, were redesignated as hard news since they called into question the criminal justice system. But the same story framed in terms of human interest, how the areas reacted to freedom or how she was dressed and behaved stays off. This two step classification had the desired effect of promoting consistent coding across countries. The content analysis was followed by an online survey of 1,000 people in each country. Half the questions on both hard and soft news topics were common to all four countries and the other half were asked of each specific country. The questions were varied in terms of their perceived difficulty. For example, questions asking American respondents to identify Taliban and the incoming president of France, Sarkozy were deemed easy by questions asking respondents to identify the location of the Tamil Tiger separatist movement and the former ruler of Serbia were considered difficult. In the area of soft news, easy questions provided highly visible targets such as the popular video sharing website YouTube. A more difficult question was the identity of the Russian tennis star Maria Sharapova. We also supplemented the domestic questions with a set of country specific questions related to the particular geopolitical zone in which each country is situated. Americans, for example, were asked to identify Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, while British and Finnish respondents were asked to identify Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany and Deigns, the incoming British premier Gordon Brown. At this point, Table 1 will be shown if the apparatus works, it does. Our content analysis shows that the market driven television system of the United States is overwhelmingly preoccupied with domestic news. American network news allocates a only 20% of their programming time to reporting foreign news, 47% of which, incidentally is about Iraq. Whole areas of the world receive very little coverage and indeed for much of the time are virtually blacked out in American network news. By contrast, the European public service television channels represented in our study devote significantly more attention to overseas news. As a proportion of news programming time, foreign coverage on the main news channels in Britain and Finland is approaching double that in the United States. In passing, it should also be noted that the worldview of British and American television either gave us looking horrified and scandalized as a proportion. Let's come back to that in passing. It should also be noted that the worldview of British and American television is significantly different from that of the two Scandinavian countries. Both Finnish and Danish television distribute their coverage of foreign news very evenly between three categories Their content Europe, the wider geopolitical zone, in the case of denmark, for example, that is the U.S. iraq and Afghanistan and the rest of the world. By contrast, both American and British television channels to vote a much smaller proportion of their foreign news time between 5 and 8% to other countries in their continent and in Britain's case, much less attention to the rest of the world. The main focus, accounting for between over half and over two thirds of our foreign news coverage, is overwhelmingly on geopolitical attachments in which Iraq and Afghanistan loom large. Also in passing, since this takes us away from the main theme of the lecture, but it's too startling to overlook the proportion of Finnish and Danish television news devoted to Europe is over four times that of British television. Both Finland and Denmark feel themselves to be part of Europe. Britain has more difficulty coming to terms with this idea. Back to the main theme. Ratings conscious. American networks also allocate significant time to soft news, both foreign and domestic, 37%, as does British television news for 40%. This compares with much lower proportions in Finland and Denmark. Indeed, the Anglo American daily quota of soft news is more than double that in Finland. The difference is partly due to the fact that both American and British television news allocates a significant amount of time, 14% and 11% respectively, to entertainment celebrities and gossip, unlike Danish and Finnish news, less than 5%. Conversely, the proportion of television hard news in the UK and US between 60 and 63%, is very much lower than in Finland, 83% in Denmark, 71%. In the case of newspapers, the preoccupation with soft news is no longer an American prerogative. In fact, our sample of American newspapers was much more oriented towards hard news than their counterparts in the European countries. As expected, the British press, with its significant tabloid tradition, is preoccupied with domestic stories, 83%, soft news 60% and debates more space, 25% than even the Danish press. To summarize, Finnish and Danish public service television is more hard news oriented and outward looking than American commercial television, with British television occupying an orbit closer to the American than the Scandinavian models. But this pattern is modified when it comes to newspapers, a less important source of information about public affairs than television. The British and Danish press prioritized soft and domestic news more than the American and Finnish press. Switching now to Table 2, the survey results revealed Americans to be especially uninformed about international public affairs. For example, 67% of American respondents were unable to identify Nicolas Sarkasy as a president of France, even though they were tipped the correct answer in one of the five responses and all the questions had an option of five answers and you clicked on the one you thought was right. Americans did much worse than Europeans in response to 7 out of the 8 common international hard news questions, the sole exception being a question about the identity of the Iraqi Prime Minister. The contrast between Americans and others was especially pronounced in relation to some topics. For example, 62% of Americans were unable to identify the Kato accords as a treaty on climate change, compared with a mere 20% in Finland and Denmark. Finn sitting and notice the front row looks unsurprised and 39% in Britain. Overall, the Scandinavians emerged as the best informed with 62 to 67% average correct responses. The British ridder to be close behind with 59% and Americans lagging in the rear with 40%. Switching to Table 3, Americans also underperformed in relation to domestic related hard news stories. Overall, Denmark and Finland scored highest in the area of domestic news knowledge with an average of 78% correct answer, followed again by Britain with 67% and the United States with 57%. Turning to awareness of international soft news, Americans were again the least informed. Thus, only 50% of Americans knew that Beijing is the site of the next Olympic games, compared with 68 to 77% in the three other countries. Overall, the British were best able to get of correct answers in this area, 79% followed by the Scandinavians and the Americans. The one area where Americans held their own was domestic soft News. Thus over 90% of Americans were able to identify the celebrities Mel Gibson, Donald Trump and Britney Spears. However, the average American score for domestic soft news was similar to that in Britain and Denmark and significantly below that of Finland in general. These data reveal a connection between news coverage and levels of public knowledge. American television reports much less international news than Finnish, Danish and British television, and Americans know very much less about foreign affairs than responding in these three countries. American television network news also report much less hard news than Finnish and Danish television. And again, the gap between what Americans and Finns and Danes know in this area is very large. British television allocates most time to international soft news and British respondents knowledge in this area is unsurpassed. Britons hold their own only in relation to domestic soft news, an area where American television is strong. There are perhaps two surprises in these results. The first is that Finns and Danes have extensive knowledge of soft as well as hard news, something that is perhaps assisted by their popular press with a large quota of soft news. The second is that American respondents seem to know less in general about the world around them than Europeans, for which there is, as we shall see, an explanation. To further pursue the connection between news coverage and public knowledge, we examined whether greater media visibility of the topics and people we asked about is in a sample of newspapers in the four countries one month and six months prior to our survey was associated with higher levels of knowledge and conversely, whether reduced media prominence of topics persons was associated with lower levels of knowledge. There were two limitations to this exercise. First, the availability of longitudinal data on news coverage limited the analysis to print media and did not include the more important medium of television. Second, there is an element of ambiguity about our understanding of visibility. A person who receives any limited press coverage in the six months leading up to the survey may yet have obtained extensive coverage before then generating a cumulative knowledge that is carried forward to the survey. Yet despite these potentially distorting inferences, our analysis suggests that there is a clear statistical relationship between extended press prominence and what is retained visibility scores in the long period in the six months preceding the survey were good predictors of the percentage of correct answers given by our participants in the U.S. uK and Denmark, though not in Finland. This analysis thus corroborates our assertion that what the media report or fail to report affects what is known. The sustained lack of attention given to international news on American television and the lack of knowledge of international public affairs in America is not a coincidence. To this point we have examined the relationship between the supply of news and the level of public knowledge, but knowledge is obviously also contingent on individuals motivation to know, their interest in current events, and attentiveness to the news media. We asked survey respondents to indicate the frequency with which they use various media sources. The results showed substantial cross national differences. Americans consume relatively little news from conventional media by comparison with populations elsewhere. Just 39% of American respondents report that they look at national TV news more than four days a week. This contrasts with 78% in Denmark, 76 in Finland, and 73% in Britain. I can't resist doing this even though I'm running short of time. But I saw a slightly hooded look on one person's face and this is so irresponsible. But let me tell you about a successful paper I gave. It was about the campaign against taxes and knowledge in Britain 1850s in the Institute of Historical Research and maybe my interest the subject was greater than that of the audience because various people had a slightly hooded look like one person had here and more to the point, the chairman behaved in a very strange way. His head kept on lowering on his chest and then rising reluctantly, like he was fighting sleep. And then his head stayed on his chest and he started asleep and he called Alan Lee. And the snoring was kind of. It was heavy breathing to start with, and people enlarged, and then it got quite loud and there was, you know, titters all around the room. And I realized that tape wasn't going very well, so I brought it to a quick sharp spot and the chairman was still asleep. So I went with that. And he shook himself and said, I'd like to thank James Curran for very stimulating. At which point there was roaring laughter. And I learned from that moment never to read a prepared text, always to speak eloquently from notes. And I'm breaking this lesson, but there's so much data. You have basically to read it out. Let me continue to this point. We have examined the relationship between the supply of news and the level of public knowledge. But knowledge is obviously also contingent on individuals motivation to know, their interest in current events, and attentiveness to news media. We ask survey respondents to indicate the frequency with which sorry, I put this already just 39% of American respondents report that they look to national TV news more than four days a week. This contrasts to much higher proportions elsewhere. One reason for this contrast is that significant numbers in the United States, a vast country with different time zones and a politically devolved form of government, are oriented towards local rather than national news. A higher proportion in The United States, 51%, say that they watch regular local television news than in Denmark and Finland, though not in Britain. But the low consumption of national television news in the US is also symptomatic of the traditionally light American News diet. Only 37% of American respondents say that they read newspapers more than four days a week. It's the US compared to 71% in Finland, 58% in Denmark, and 44% in the UK. Just 39% of Americans listen to radio news more than four days a week, compared to significantly higher levels elsewhere. In short, one reason why Americans know less about the world around them than Finns, Danes, and the British is that Americans consume relatively little news in comparison to populations elsewhere. It's possible that Americans make up for their deficit and old media consumption with greater use of the Internet. Indeed, they do have greater use of the Internet, but the available evidence casts doubt on that particular scheme. Research by the Pew center, for instance, demonstrates that total consumption of news across all outlets in the US actually declined between 1994 and 2004. That's a period of enormous expansion of ATL. Moreover, the greatest decline in news consumption occurred among young adults, the most Internet oriented cohort of the electorate. At this point, I'll turn to Table 4. Another factor contributing to American underperformance is that the knowledge gap between social groups is greater than America than in the three other European countries we studied. Disadvantaged groups in the United States perform especially poorly in our knowledge tests, lowering the national average American score. The reverse is the case with our counterparts doing better in relation to the mean and raising the average national scores of Finland, Denmark and Britain. The contrast is especially notable in relation to education. We divided the populations of the four countries into three comparable educational groups. Those with limited education, moderate medium education, and they're highly educated graduates and postgraduates. Those with limited education in the United States score very much lower in relation to hard news questions than those with higher education. The difference between them is a massive 40 percentage points. By contrast, the difference between the same two groups in the United Kingdom is 14 percentage points, 13 percentage points in Finland, and in effect, none in Denmark. A similar pattern occurs in relation to income. That income data was not collected in Denmark. In the United States, an average of only 29% of the low income group give correct answers to hard news questions compared with 61% of the high income group, a difference of 32 percentage points. The comparable difference is less than half this in Britain as a proportion and is actually inverted in Finland. There is also a significant hard news knowledge gap between the ethnic majority and ethnic minorities in the US of 15 percentage points, but in Britain there is none. Data was not analyzed for ethnic minorities in Denmark, Finland, Denmark and Finland, where they're a very small proportion of the population. These findings fit a general pattern of more variance in the distribution of knowledge in the United States compared with elsewhere. The difference, for example, in the hard use scores of men and women and of young and old is more pronounced in the United States than in the free European countries. Thus, there appears to be a higher minimum threshold information in the free European countries. Compared with the United States, national television in Europe is more successful in reaching disadvantaged groups defined in terms of income, education and ethnicity. Partly as a consequence of its public service tradition, public broadcasters financed by a license p or public branch are under enormous pressure to connect to all sections of society in order to justify their continued public funding. Any evidence that they are losing their appeal to a section of the audience usually results in urgent internal inquest and demands for immediate action. By contrast, commercial media tend to be exposed to pressure to prioritize high spending audiences in order to maximize advertising revenue. This can result in low income groups receiving less attention and even exceptional cases being deliberately shunned. The central objectives of public service and commercial media are also different. The primary goal of commercial media is to make money, while that of public service organisations is to serve society in ways that are defined in law and regulation. One of the principal public obligations is to inform the public which influences when news programs are transmitted. This seems to me to be key. The free American television networks transmit their main news programs in the early and late evening. They reserve the hours between 7pm and 11pm for entertainment in order to maximize ratings and revenue. By contrast, the top three television channels in Finland transmit their main news programs at different times throughout the evening at 6 o', clock, 7 o', clock, 8:30 and 10pm and one of these principal channels a daily current affairs program at 9:30pm In Denmark, the two leading television channels transmit their main news programs at 6, 7 and 10, spliced by a current affairs program on one of these channels at 9:30. In both countries, the top television channels, including Finland's commercial MTV Free channel, offer a steady drip feed of public information in primetime. In contrast to the entertainment intensive schedules of America's market driven television system. British television balances uncertainly between these two models. In 1999 ITV adopted the American scheduling strategy of an early and late evening news slot, something made possible by its increased daily regulation. This exerted ratings pressure on the BBC1, which then moved its 9 o' clock news program to 10 o'. Clock. Public pressure then forced IDV in 2004 to bring forward its main news programs to the earlier time at 10:30. The main news inputs from Britain's top three channels are now 6, 6:30, 7, 10 and 10:30. As a consequence of their social inclusion and information commitments, public service television in Finland and Denmark and even in Britain have been relatively successful in getting disadvantaged groups to join in the national ritual or watching the evening news. Much higher proportions of the less educated and those with low incomes watch television news on a regular basis there than in the United States. This is not just a function of the higher levels of national TV news consumption in these three countries. The difference between the proportion of those with limited education and the national average in watching regular news is smaller than UK and Finland than in the US and the same is true for low income groups in the United Kingdom and Denmark. Similarly, ethnic minorities exposure to national TV news is below the national average in the US but the same as the national average in the uk. The greater degree of economic inequality in the US compared with Europe is probably the main cause of the large knowledge disparity in the U.S. but one reason why the low income and low education groups in the US are less informed about hard news is they are much less inclined to watch national television news than their counterparts in the free European countries. But although the media are organized Sorry, but although how the media are organized and how and when they report the news are significant influences on the level of public knowledge, they are less important than deep seated societal factors. This is highlighted by the regression model that we constructed for predicting knowledge of hard news topics in the four countries. The model accounts for a good deal of variance, approaching to half in the pooled data set. It showed that gender and education are strong predictors of knowledge, more so than media exposure. But what is very much more important, and whose mediation also diminishes these other factors as autonomous inferences, is interest in politics. Respondents who say they want to be up to date with what happens in government, are interested in politics and talk about politics are greatly more knowledgeable than those who express lack of interest. Indeed, being interested is the single most important correlate of hard used knowledge in all foreign countries. In conclusion, how the media are organized is less important than wider processes in society of a kind that generates spontaneous interest in public affairs in determining knowledge that generates spontaneous interest, or a kind that generates spontaneous interest in public affairs in determining knowledge about public life. But this does not mean that the architecture of media systems is unimportant. Our evidence suggests that the public service model of broadcasting gives greater attention to public affairs and international news and thus fosters greater knowledge in these areas than the market model. The public service model makes television news more accessible on leading channels and fosters higher levels of TV news consum consumption as a consequence. It also contributes to a diminution of the knowledge gap between the advantage and disadvantage and in this way contributes to a more equitable pattern of citizenship. But perhaps the key point to emerge from this study is the low level of attention that the market driven television system of the United States gives to the world outside America and to a lesser extent to hard news. This contributes, our study suggests, to the high level of public ignorance that exists in America about the wider world and about public life in general. Yet there has been a worldwide movement towards the entertainment centered model of American television. If this trend continues, he seems set to foster an impoverished public life characterized by declining exposure to serious journalism and by reduced levels of public knowledge.