Ofcom’s Transmission Critical: The Future of Public Service Media sets out to assess how the UK’s public service media system must adapt to ensure its sustainability. Framed as a comprehensive review, the report makes some welcome acknowledgements about the value of trusted news, the impact of digital transformation, and the regulatory role that Ofcom plays in ensuring PSBs retain prominence in a rapidly changing media landscape.
But for those of us working at the heart of community media and local civic communication, the report is conspicuously lacking. Transmission Critical is an unambiguous expression of an industrially-oriented media strategy – one that is designed for the market and by the market – with citizen needs and participatory democratic communication relegated to the margins.
The report’s brief and passing references to community radio reveal the depth of the problem. Rather than recognising community media as a legitimate and independent component of a plural media ecosystem, Ofcom continues to frame community radio as a peripheral training ground – a stepping stone for talent on its way to “bigger” stages in commercial and institutional PSBs. There is no recognition of the cultural, civic, and social function that independent local media plays as a self-contained and self-directed form of public service, rooted in place, community relationships, and democratic accountability.
This isn’t just an omission. It is a systemic failure of perspective.
Ofcom’s framework remains tethered to the ‘pipeline model’ – a linear view of media skills development that begins with grassroots activity and ends with employment in commercial or national broadcasting. This model diminishes the autonomy of community-led media and serves only to reinforce extractive hierarchies that drain local capacity to serve industrial needs elsewhere.
This would be less concerning if the UK media industry were significantly regulated in the public interest. But it is not. It enjoys a high degree of operational freedom in the marketplace, and the idea that it must also be subsidised – directly or indirectly – through protective legislation, privileged access, and public funding, raises serious questions about fairness, equity, and purpose.
We must ask: why are we using public policy to shore up commercial providers, while neglecting the organisations that are embedded in communities and directly accountable to them?
There is a marked absence in the report of any substantive civic framework through which media regulation might empower independent, community-based and citizen-led communication. We find no evidence that Ofcom or DCMS are developing mechanisms that support media from the middle – through mutual, co-operative, and self-organised infrastructures that are accountable to local people, not shareholders or Whitehall strategists.
Indeed, the report’s treatment of media literacy – ostensibly a pillar of its civic offer – falls short. It continues to be defined in passive terms: audiences are framed as recipients of improved comprehension, not as producers or co-designers of meaningful media practices. The promise of participative, co-produced media literacy – something the community media sector has pioneered for decades – is entirely absent.
This industrial skew is evident in the report’s call for collaborative journalism and news partnerships, which are presented as opportunities for PSBs and universities to innovate together. Nowhere is there a reference to the lessons and practices of the community radio sector, where co-produced news, shared editorial ethics, and trust-based access to marginalised voices are not novelties – they are norms. The fact that Ofcom has recently downgraded the enforceability of Community Radio Key Commitments, without replacing them with robust or independent evaluation frameworks, makes the omission even more troubling.
If Ofcom’s report reveals anything, it is the widening democratic deficit in media policy. Decisions are being made centrally, through consultation loops dominated by industry voices, and without genuine participation from citizens, civil society, or the independent community media sector. There is little mention of empowerment. There is no strategy for developing civic media infrastructures. There is no vision for how media policy can be co-created with the people it claims to serve.
Instead, we see a report that has been cooked up at the centre, bypassing the vital need to build media systems that are inclusive, reflexive, and responsive to the everyday realities of people across the UK. If this continues, we risk further eroding trust in the regulatory process, and undermining the foundational principle that media in a democratic society should serve the public, not just the market.
As Decentered Media, we call for a fundamentally different approach. One that starts not with broadcast towers and international markets, but with communities of place, identity and experience. One that treats media as a right, not a commodity. One that nurtures independent, decentralised media infrastructures that foster social cohesion, democratic engagement and local resilience.
Public service media is not only about platform prominence or algorithmic discoverability. It is about trust, relationships, and meaningful participation. If Ofcom is serious about the future of public service media, it must stop looking up to industry – and start looking across, to the civic voices building public value from the ground up.