Journalism student here. Tbh in my experience I have come to the conclusion that news stations should never be state owned. I think state funding for news is good but I think the best solution is a non profit ngo group running the news. When the government owns the news they can change the news and manipulate what facts get shown as is the case with the BBC.
It scales. Privately owned community newspapers might have a bias, but if there’s one in every town with 1,000 people, then exponentially that increases the amount of different agendas of each of those private entities, and they can sort of cover each other’s weaknesses. It’s the concentration and consolidation that’s the issue.
Of course, private industry inherently wants to merge and consolidate, as is the nature of capitalist competition. So either you continually break up mergers or develop a public community newspapers that are independent of any government - its debatable how independent the BBC or CBC are.
Your second paragraph is severely understated. It completely invalidates your first paragraph.
In the USA there are 4 corporations that own pretty much all TV news, whether it’s local or not. Add another 2 corporations to cover almost everything else on TV.
Online news is a little more diverse, but it’s heading in the same direction.
And the government won’t break up those corporations because they’re too big for that to be possible. It’s too late. Whether the corporations use regulatory capture or just a massive team of lawyers to make antitrust lawsuits prohibitively expensive, they simply can’t be broken up.
