Research & Methodology
A universal measurement framework for public broadcaster quality
Public-service broadcasters in virtually every democracy are legally required to report in a balanced, accurate, and diverse manner. The specific wording varies — from the BBC Charter to German media law to regulatory frameworks in Japan, South Korea, or South Africa — but the core obligation is the same: publicly funded media owe the public proportional representation.
SVFAB has developed a measurement system that operationalises these legal mandates across borders.
1. The 15 Criteria
SVFAB measures public broadcasts against 15 documented techniques of imbalanced reporting: from framing and selective word choice to expert selection and guilt by association, through to timing and temporal framing. These criteria are applied identically across all 145 countries.
2. Methodology
The analysis is AI-assisted, inter-coder validated, and fully reproducible. Every finding references the exact minute and second of the broadcast — every result is independently verifiable. The methodology is language-agnostic and deployed across 76 languages.
3. Why public broadcasters are measured differently
Independent media — newspapers, online portals, blogs — are entitled to an editorial line. That is their right. Public broadcasters are held to a different standard: funded by licence fees or taxes, they are legally obligated to provide balanced coverage. SVFAB measures exclusively whether this legal mandate is met.
4. Scale
145
Countries — systematic, not sampled
>16M
Items in the corpus, updated daily
76
Languages — one methodology, language-agnostic
60
Years of time series — retrospective to 1968
5. Scientific Publications
The SVFAB methodology is documented in peer-reviewed working papers, freely available on SSRN:
Paper 1 — Full Framework
Schlaepfer, David (2026). Systematic AI-Assisted Analysis of Public Broadcaster Impartiality: A Scalable Methodological Framework for Measuring Structural Bias in Public Service Media.
Paper 2 — Suppression Index
Schlaepfer, David (2026). Measuring Editorial Noise: A Retrospective Suppression Index for Public Broadcasting Content Analysis.
Paper 3 — Source Traffic Light
Schlaepfer, David (2026). The Source Traffic Light: A Six-Dimensional Credibility Framework for Systematic Source Assessment in Public Service Media.
Methodology Report V14.5.26 (May 2026) — PDF Download
SVFAB — Swiss Association for Balanced Reporting
Postfach, CH-8021 Zürich