alt Hacker NewsThis position is suitable, for the 1990s. Even then, the BBC showed that public journalism != propaganda.
In fact, the evidence is that if you build institutions, you can actually have very effective public options.
However, in the current era, news is simply being outcompeted for revenue. Even the NYT is dependent on games for relevance.
And the attack vectors to mould and muzzle public understanding have changed. Instead of a steady drip of controlled information, it is private production of overwhelming amounts of content.
Most good people are fighting yesterdays war, with yesterdays weapons, tactics and ideas when it comes to speech.
The real reporting now comes from individual creators often with a gopro or cellphone camera and a youtube/tiktok channel.
It's cheap to make, doesn't require state/institutional funding. It's also quite hard to buyout all the creators and thus at least slightly resilient against the usual attack vectors.