The PBS Editorial Standards & Practices articulate the core principles that ensure the quality and integrity of all PBS content across all platforms. These standards are the cornerstone of PBS’s commitment to serving the public interest and preserving the public’s trust.
Every few years, PBS convenes a blue-ribbon working group of public media leaders, experts in journalism ethics, and experienced journalists from across the industry to carefully review and recommend updates to the PBS Editorial Standards. The results of that deliberative 18-month process are the updated standards that were adopted by the PBS Board of Directors on June 10, 2025.
This update represents an important evolution of the long-standing PBS Editorial Standards that is informed by our daily work to ensure that PBS content is the most rigorous, credible, and trustworthy content available. To that end, the standards include a new paragraph (Section IV.C.5) about potential uses of generative artificial intelligence tools. This new section requires both: (i) that we uphold the principle of independence by never abrogating our fundamental editorial role to an artificial intelligence; and (ii) that any uses of generative tools be for the purpose of furthering the educational public service mission articulated on the first page of the standards. This will empower public media to take a measured, intentional approach to leveraging the possibilities of new tools.
In addition to this section, which is intended to serve as a future-proof reminder of core values through any upcoming changes in the technology, the issue of applying standards to the use of this emerging technology has been threaded throughout the standards for illustrative purposes, including into sections about fact-checking, attributing non-original materials, identifying re-creations, and vetting third-party content. All of this is intended to codify and further existing resources, including detailed guidance on ensuring accurate, transparent, and inclusive use and the case study hypothetical scenario available on applying the standards.
The PBS Editorial Standards provide both conceptual principles to guide our work as well as practical guidance on day-to-day matters. Section IV on Application of Principles was added in 2018 to make the policy a more useful reference material for working producers. In this year’s update, the application section has been reorganized so that it more logically follows the flow of production, including an opening subsection on Sources and Materials, followed by Production and Editing, before delving into Emerging Technologies and the unique considerations around Children’s Content (which has been updated to address educational games and interactive experiences, as well as the important role of learning frameworks in core curriculum areas).
With regard to sources, the provision about anonymity (Section IV.A.3) has been expanded to ensure that PBS content relies on anonymous sources in limited circumstances, closely scrutinizes those sources, and shares as much as possible with the audience about any use of those sources. For instance, the updated standards specify that producers “should be able to describe to the Executive Producer how the source knows the information, the source’s motivations, why anonymity would be required, and any other details that will help evaluate the source’s credibility.” The core principle of transparency requires that content be produced in a way that allows the audience to evaluate the credibility of the work and determine for themselves whether it is trustworthy. This update is consistent with the rigorous practices that are highlighted in the anonymity case study on the PBS Standards site.
The standards have been updated in other ways to more accurately codify PBS’s practices. This includes: new sections on ensuring that content is as accessible as possible and minimizing potential harm to vulnerable sources, clarifications to the stakeholder roles section (such as the application of the standards to any content acquisitions and the editorial independence of local member stations), and additional cross-references to the critically important companion PBS Funding Standards & Practices, which articulate the fundamental tenets that safeguard the noncommercial mission of PBS.
The PBS Editorial Standards Review Committee that conducted this detailed review and update of the standards was chaired by Catherine Robb, Vice Chair of the PBS Board of Directors, and was facilitated by Sitara Nieves, Vice President of Teaching and Organizational Strategy at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies. The committee included the leaders of local stations Houston Public Media and Connecticut Public, Lisa Shumate and Mark Contreras, respectively. The committee’s work was informed by two experienced returning members from prior reviews: Evan Smith, Co-Founder and former CEO of The Texas Tribune, and Indira Lakshmanan, Ideas & Opinions Editor at U.S. News & World Report. And importantly, the committee included six new members that brought fresh perspectives and expertise from across the media landscape to its review: LaSharah Bunting, Vice President at The 19th; Dana Canedy, Managing Editor at The Guardian US; Kathleen Culver, Director at the Center for Journalism Ethics at University of Wisconsin-Madison; Elahe Izadi, media reporter at The Washington Post; Will Knight, senior writer at WIRED; and Holden Thorp, Editor-in-Chief at the Science family of journals.
With these updated standards in hand, the work continues, with the educational public service mission of the PBS Editorial Standards & Practices as the North Star: “Content distributed by PBS should reflect the highest standards of quality and professionalism, demonstrate a rigorous commitment to editorial integrity unencumbered by commercial imperatives, and further society’s fundamental interest in respect and informed civil discourse. The hallmark of PBS content is editorial integrity.”