I mean, I love me some BBC, but there are plenty of publicly funded media outlets that are essentially just state propaganda. I don't think public funding is a panacea.
It's obviously not a panacea, but it solves or can solve a specific set of problems.
For anyone that has trouble imagining what I could possibly be talking about, there are some examples discussed here [1], from which I highlight a handful of bullet points, which may not all be mutually exclusive:
- financial stability
- the need to "chase the algorithm"
- sensationalism as a perverse incentive of the market
- a lack of incentivization of quality content
- the perverse disincentivization of long-form content
- the perverse incentivization of cheap editorial content over expensive investigative journalism
- the availability of quality information to people who can't afford to pay for an expensive news subscription or who may simply not have access to news where they are
- editorial independence from commercial or industrial interests
- long-term viability of more local news
- collapsing advertising revenue due to macro, social and tech trends
- parasitic audience capture by social media platforms
