A new innovative method to evaluate public news broadcasting: Preserving democracy, culture, and identity during the first AI revolution

As the first AI revolution rapidly eliminates numerous journalism, reporting, and news writing jobs, the debate over taxpayer-funded public broadcasting entities in some countries gains momentum. The potential threats posed by AI-generated content, unregulated or self-regulated social media, and radical social networking sites to public opinion and election results are concerning. This study presents the first cost-benefit analysis of publicly funded broadcasting, with a focus on the CBC/Radio-Canada. The benefits are estimated using mathematical models via the mass (Canadian Newsstream database) and social media (YouTube). CBC/Radio-Canada has contributed 471,706 newsprints via the news wire, while also generating 126,436 videos across 16 YouTube accounts, with 4,031,467,452 views and 8,065,340 subscribers, resulting in a benefit-to-cost ratio of 2.17 × 10⁵:1. Therefore, CBC/Radio-Canada, as a taxpayer-funded entity, is highly cost-effective and efficient. CBC/Radio-Canada further contributes billions of dollars annually to the local and national economies, while also playing a vital role in preserving the cultures and identities of its many nations, promoting official languages, multiculturalism, tolerance, national cohesion, and international influence, and, most importantly, democracy in an ever-changing world. It is recommended that CBC/Radio-Canada begin offering more Canadian news and content in local, rural, French, Indigenous, Inuit, and other languages.