Ezra Klein: prediction

Transcript context

…Do they even matter? I think they matter a lot less than they used to. Look, in America, it’s been true for a very long time. PBS was never as powerful as the BBC is, and PBS has been just shrinking in influence, as every single individual channel has been in America forever, right? You’ve read the media chapter of my book, and so you know that a lot of what I’m talking about there is the effect of incredibly intense forms of competition on the broader media sphere. So, PBS, NPR, all public media is undergoing some of the same dynamics there as everybody else, which is, they’re just war for attention. In some ways it might be good for them and their trust in the long run. They’re also a little bit less able to fight that war because they need to hold their political sponsors in place. So, you can’t become quite as outrageous on PBS. I think, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post have made more moves to be viral than PBS has. And I’m not saying that’s a wrong thing for PBS to do. I like PBS a lot. I admire what they do greatly. But I think a problem for PBS is that they’re widely admired, and sometimes they’re not as widely shared. Long term, it’s probably good for their trust. Short term, that’s probably quite bad for their influence. In England, I’m a little less sure of what the future of the BBC is. I know Boris Johnson is not a fan. So I could imagine it weakening in terms of its power and its influence. I also know, at the same time, that the way that Johnson was covered on the BBC has created incredible levels of anger on the UK left, which is probably weakening the BBC’s hold on that constituency as well. So I suspect that the BBC is both subject to the same competitive dynamics as you’re seeing here — although it starts from a place of more power in centralization and funding than PBS does here, than NPR does here — and then secondarily, is in a more intense form of its political vise than those players are here, in part because it’s more important, and so there’s more margin for different political players in attacking or weakening it. They’ll never cover Brexit well, perhaps, right?…

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