‘A love for the people’: Young people’s perceptions of public service media values in Sweden and Estonia

Public service media (PSM) across Europe face ongoing challenges related to declining audience use, particularly among younger generations, who increasingly turn to social media platforms and commercial media. These developments have often been interpreted as signalling a crisis of legitimacy of PSM and their public value. This paper explores such assumptions by examining how young people themselves understand, experience, and articulate the value of PSM. The paper draws upon an exploratory comparative study of focus group discussions conducted with young adults in Sweden and Estonia. The findings show that while participants in both countries rarely use PSM as part of their routine media consumption, they nonetheless attribute significant societal relevance and value to these media. They consistently associate PSM with decommodification, trustworthiness, education, inclusion, accessibility, and national continuity, often defining these values explicitly in contrast to commercial and social media platforms. They were also associated with childhood memories and family rituals. Although these themes were common across the two national contexts, there were differences pertaining to their history and sociopolitical context. We conclude that limited use of PSM among young people does not necessarily signal a lack of recognition of their public value.