POLICY BRIEF article

Front. Commun.

Sec. Media Governance and the Public Sphere

Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1569363

This article is part of the Research TopicUnderstanding Media Policy in the 21st Century: Affirmation, Challenge, Re-ConstitutionView all 7 articles

Rethinking Transparency in Public Service Media

Provisionally accepted
Hilde Van den BulckHilde Van den Bulck1Minna HorowitzMinna Horowitz2*Tim RaatsTim Raats3
  • 1Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
  • 2University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
  • 3Vrije University Brussels, Brussels, Brussels, Belgium

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Select one of your emails

You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:

Notify me on publication

Please enter your email address:

If you already have an account, please login

You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here

Transparency has become a cornerstone of public service media (PSM) governance yet it remains inconsistently understood and applied. Increased scrutiny from various stakeholders has resulted in a need for actionable and meaningful transparency. Scholarly evidence highlights transparency's benefits and risks, including potential misuse, as illustrated with current examples from Finnish PSM organization Yle and tVRT in Flanders (Belgium).This brief provides a multidimensional framework for actionable transparency efforts that allow PSM to move beyond ad hoc, reactive, and partial approaches by elaborating key dimensions of transparency about what, when, how, by whom, and to whom transparency is required. Recommendations include fostering transparency practices that are meaningful and resistant to weaponization and politicization, developing participatory governance models, and leveraging transparency as a tool for organizational resilience.

Keywords: Public service media (PSM), policy, Transparency, EU, Legitimacy, sustainability

Received: 31 Jan 2025; Accepted: 16 Jun 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Van den Bulck, Horowitz and Raats. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Minna Horowitz, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary Material