Journalists should be funded by the public, as they perform a public service, while simultaneously they should not be required to report favorably upon the state.

And that’s the crux of the issue, isn’t it? You can’t let corpos piss all over journalism to turn it yellow, and you can’t let a state-run press dictate the citizen’s world view.

Information wants to be free, and that’s realistically the only way it can work.