State-support for media can take a wide range of forms, several of which are fairly resistant to control, coercion, and/or curruption:
- Distribution supports, as with discounts on US postal rates for printed matter, a policy dating to Benjamin Franklin.
- Tax breaks for publsihers.
- Legal notices and other advertising. Legal notices are simply an obligation put on third parties to take out box ads within newspapers. Other advertising might be for government services by some governmental unit. As with other forms of direct payment, there are both multiple levels of government (local, regional, state, federal), and numerous independent units. A larger city/metro paper might well represent numerous towns and cities, as well as multiple counties, and even possibly multiple states if near a state-line. Each of these could contribute independently to the news organisation, and cutting off or controlling all such spend would be difficult to coordinate.
- Direct tax-based subsidies for news. As with ad spend, again a news organisation would have numerous sources of support, with a strong degree of independence amongst those.
Many people seem to jump straight to "one level of government providing 100% support to one global news organisation". That's not at all what I'm envisioning; there would and should be a multiplicity of both funding sources and funded organisations.
- Distribution supports, as with discounts on US postal rates for printed matter, a policy dating to Benjamin Franklin.
- Tax breaks for publsihers.
- Legal notices and other advertising. Legal notices are simply an obligation put on third parties to take out box ads within newspapers. Other advertising might be for government services by some governmental unit. As with other forms of direct payment, there are both multiple levels of government (local, regional, state, federal), and numerous independent units. A larger city/metro paper might well represent numerous towns and cities, as well as multiple counties, and even possibly multiple states if near a state-line. Each of these could contribute independently to the news organisation, and cutting off or controlling all such spend would be difficult to coordinate.
- Direct tax-based subsidies for news. As with ad spend, again a news organisation would have numerous sources of support, with a strong degree of independence amongst those.
Many people seem to jump straight to "one level of government providing 100% support to one global news organisation". That's not at all what I'm envisioning; there would and should be a multiplicity of both funding sources and funded organisations.