Can we at least try to acknowledge that there are many shades of gray between:
- news funded by oppressive regimes with an explicit goal of furthering their own agenda
- news funded by extremely rich and powerful people with an explicit goal of furthering their own agenda
If you squint a little, these are essentially the same.
There needs to be publicly funded journalism - who else is going to report on stories that would threaten the status quo of rich & powerful?
At the same time, there need to be strong protections in place that make it hard for the government to meddle with day to day operations of the press, allowing them to freely report on things that reflect poorly on the government.
This setup shouldn't pose a problem for any nation and government that considers themselves democratic.
> There needs to be publicly funded journalism - who else is going to report on stories that would threaten the status quo of rich & powerful?
The way to enable stories that threaten the status quo of the rich and powerful is to enforce freedom of speech for everyone, so anyone who is being screwed by the rich and powerful can say so, publicly, and not get canceled.
"Publicly funded journalism" does nothing of the kind, because the funding of "publicly funded journalism" comes from...the rich and powerful. Either through the government (who do you think runs the government? certainly not the poor and powerless) or through "nonprofit" organizations that can't survive, let alone pay the costs of journalism, without donations from the rich and powerful.
Yes, the government is powerful, but you ignored the 2nd part of my comment which addressed the concern you're repeating again.
> At the same time, there need to be strong protections in place that make it hard for the government to meddle with day to day operations of the press, allowing them to freely report on things that reflect poorly on the government.
> If you squint a little, these are essentially the same.
So are all the "shades of gray" in between. Every source of journalism we have is funded by someone who wants to further their own agenda. We have no source of journalism whose purpose is to just report the truth and let the public draw their own conclusions. Let alone one that can actually stick to that purpose in the face of the temptation to push a favored narrative.
- news funded by oppressive regimes with an explicit goal of furthering their own agenda
- news funded by extremely rich and powerful people with an explicit goal of furthering their own agenda
If you squint a little, these are essentially the same.
There needs to be publicly funded journalism - who else is going to report on stories that would threaten the status quo of rich & powerful?
At the same time, there need to be strong protections in place that make it hard for the government to meddle with day to day operations of the press, allowing them to freely report on things that reflect poorly on the government.
This setup shouldn't pose a problem for any nation and government that considers themselves democratic.