The European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) sets out the best practices to ensure the independence of Public Service Media providers (PSMs), though it is toothless. 

PSMs play a unique democracy-sustaining role in the digital age by providing the population with balanced news coverage, thus combatting misinformation.

The UK’s BBC is the blueprint for the EMFA and the comparison with Czechia and France demonstrates how political forces challenge independence.

Alongside freezing the licence fee for the next two years, the government made it clear that it believes the fee is no longer the optimal mechanism to fund the BBC, demonstrating a willingness to remove it in 2028

What seems to be the government's preferred replacement, a subscription, is not ideal: there are structural issues that mean it would not be possible to have a service that all could subscribe to without a costly switchover

Furthermore, a subscription would undermine a number of tenets of public service broadcasting, most notably universality, breadth of programming and representing the diversity of Britain—naturally a subscription service would pivot to commercially efficient content that targets its subscribers and those most likely to subscribe