Earlier quoted context omitted.
State financing and governmental curation of content is the worst thing you can think of if you want freedom of the press. It doesn't matter if it's called "fairness", or "public good", or "truth", or anything else - by the end of it, it would be just a means by which people currently in power can shape the content of the news. It is never a good idea to give governmental enforcers control over the content of the pre…
> State financing and governmental curation of content is the worst thing you can think of if you want freedom of the press. You can have public funding with independent editorial control and content curation. This is how most publicly funded news outlets work in liberal democracies, such as the BBC.
How would you ensure that "independent editorial control" would not oppress unpopular opinions? Institute yet another independent curator of curators? And then the third one and fourth one? Why not just leave the people alone and instead of having a dozen curatorial organizations just let them themselves choose what they want to read and listen to? You think they are not able of figuring it by themselves?
> This is how most publicly funded news outlets work in liberal democracies, such as the BBC.
Most of those outlets are very biased and open only to particular set of opinions. Including, of course, BBC. While they manage to occasionally produce high-quality content, they certainly nowhere near providing an adequate representation of the spectrum of opinion existing in the society. Fortunately, in most liberal democracies state-run media does not enjoy the monopoly on information, thus this bias is easily corrected by a gamut of other media outlets. However, since private media is capable of representing the whole gamut of opinions anyway, and to produce high-quality content too, and there is no discernable advantage in public media in that regard, what's the point of having it at all?