Public media around the globe are fighting for their lives. It’s a fight we can and must win.

That was the message Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, brought to an overflow crowd at a panel discussion on the future of public media sponsored by Free Press and the New America Foundation on Tuesday. Thompson was joined by panelists representing public media, journalism and academia, including Paula Kerger, president and CEO of PBS, Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and Geneva Overholser, director of USC Annenberg's School of Journalism.

The role of public versus commercial media, the power of media in our lives and our communities, and the radical transformations needed to respond to the digital age were all at the forefront of the discussion. But the overarching theme that seemed to connect all of these discussions was the clear need for public media advocates, journalists, producers and leaders to speak up and fight for the future of public service journalism.

It’s ironic that such a fight is needed when, as many of the panelists pointed out, public media is the most trusted and well respected media institution in both the US and the UK. Both the BBC and NPR/PBS are citizen funded - the BBC through license fees paid by consumers; American public broadcasting through donations and some tax dollars.

And yet, in both countries, public media is being called on to reinvent itself for the digital age and is facing new challenges to its structure and mission. Thompson said:

Public service broadcasting is founded on a belief in ‘public space,’ in other words on the belief that there is room for a place which is ‘neither’ part of the state ‘nor’ purely governed by commercial considerations, which everyone is free to enter and within which they can encounter culture, education, debate, where they can share and swap experiences.Right now even the idea of public space is being challenged, especially on the web, as commercial media struggles with the immense challenge of monetization. In fact it seems to me that digital media and its open, democratizing spirit, represent an almost perfect fit with what I mean by the term ‘public space', and that if the BBC and other public broadcasters can migrate successfully into this new world, that -- far from slipping to our audiences' peripheral vision, our eye and ear contact with them can grow deeper and more valuable.

Thompson’s opening remarks sparked a lively debate on the panel. Kerger of PBS outlined some of the new digital projects they are working on, most of which are focusing on local news and journalism and are leveraging the unique, local, distributed network of stations that PBS is based around. Pointing to projects like the PBS Local Journalism Centers, she described American public media as a cooperative able to connect local stations with a national network. She said:

What we're missing in the U.S. is a place for a national conversation incorporating various perspectives. At PBS and NPR we are trying to provide that.

Overholser echoed the potential for public media to connect people in new ways, but said that we need to radically re-imagine public media. As the audience for all media has become both consumers and creators, she stressed that we need a public media system that fosters and empowers all communities. For Lemann of Columbia University, the most pressing concern is less about a national conversation and more about “the enormous lack of funding for original news reporting,” which he describes as “a key but expensive subcategory of the news.” Thompson called NPR and PBS “sleeping giants” whose impact has been deeply underestimated.

Each of the panelists agreed that public media has the potential to meet the growing information needs of communities, but that the need far outweighs the resources currently available. If we are to undertake the kind of “radical re-imagining” that the panelists agreed was necessary, we need to consider how we’ll fund the future of non-commercial media in America. Overholser noted that the government has always been deeply involved in shaping commercial and noncommercial media in America through both direct and in-direct subsidies.

But Lemann says that argument is not enough to make the case for expanded funding in the future. He called for more research on how other government programs – from the Office of Management and Budget to the U.S. Census – have built political firewalls between government funding and political influence. Thompson agreed that taking public funds can be balanced with the right governance structure, values and leadership.

During the event, Free Press released an executive summary of a forthcoming research paper comparing the governance structures and political firewalls of public media systems in 14 different democracies. One of the key findings was that in every nation, publicly funded media are providing more and higher quality public affairs programming and a greater diversity of genres and unique perspectives than their commercial counterparts. In each case, strong media policies, deep citizen engagement, and robust public funding have made all the difference.

Stay tuned for the full report that will be released later this month. And check out the online discussion that happened during the event below: