Nearly every HN post with a paywall has comments boycotting or denouncing said paywall, how else do you expect them to survive?
Americans would and should pay for this, collectively and without recourse, via a strong social safety net and possibly taxes. Your shelter, your food, a high quality of life for your kids, etc. should all basically be provided for, so that people can take risks and be daring journalists without being guilt-tripped into feeling like they sacrificed their offspring to their ego.
However, levying taxes to pay for things has been systematically demonized as just not an option at all, and by-and-large people have been hoodwinked into believing that more and more facets of society need to be mediated via "the free market", and if they fail that test, they are not deserving of existence.
It'll take a while until people realize that the market is just a tool, not a be-all-and-end-all.
Granted it's a debated topic: http://cbcexposed.blogspot.ca/2017/07/is-cbc-news-biased.htm...
That relationship was pretty combative from both sides, though, no?
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cbc-budget-cut-by-115m-over-...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/cbc-funding-h...
Despite NPR's reputation, many on the left are increasingly distrustful and critical of them, while many listeners on the right seem to prefer their talk shows to be full of yelling. I'm not sure the relentlessly centrist strategy is working for them.
And in some ways, it's unnecessary. Thanks to endowments and listener contributions, NPR could drop government money without major impact. Public funding is a small part of their budget.
Turns out corporations give them a lot of money too.
[0] http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances
> "According to CPB, in 2009 11.3% of the aggregate revenues of all public radio broadcasting stations were funded from federal sources, principally through CPB; in 2012 10.9% of the revenues for Public Radio came from federal sources."
It appears approximately 10% of NPR funding is from the US government. That's a decent chunk, but not enough to hold sway if it goes against the majority of their donors.
Contrast that with a services like the BBC and RT which are almost all funded by taxpayer money:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#Finances
> "According to the BBC's 2013/14 Annual Report, its total income was £5 billion (£5.066 billion),[2] which can be broken down as follows:
* £3.726 billion in licence fees collected from householders; * £1.023 billion from the BBC's commercial businesses; * £244.6 million from government grants, of which £238.5 million is from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for the BBC World Service; * £72.1 million from other income, such as rental collections and royalties from overseas broadcasts of programming. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)#Budget
"When it was established in 2005, ANO TV-Novosti invested $30 million in start-up costs to establish RT,[14] with a budget of $30 million for its first year of operation. Half of the network's budget came from the Russian government; the other half came from pro-Kremlin commercial banks at the government's request."
"About 80 percent of RT's costs are incurred outside Russia, paying partner networks around $260 million for the distribution of its channels in 2014."
"In 2015, RT was expected to receive 19 billion rubles ($307 million) from the Russian government in 2016."
I'm not saying that I agree with this position. I think that without capital, the news industry would shrink and struggle even with a strong social safety net to support its journalists. Personal blogs cannot fully replace well funded news organizations.
I'm more concerned with the family of a daring journalist being safe regardless of their investigations, than with the actual remuneration of the journalist.
If a public broadcaster publishes plainly biased stories, independent media can lambast them. But the shaming only has effect if the independent media is itself taken seriously; so the critique has to come from the middle ground.
What you won't get from publicly funded news is a rounded perspective on what opposing camps think. The extremes are lopped off; you won't get small government conservative ideology, and you won't get communist ideology. Being anodyne and factual is the best defense against criticism from both independent media and political sources.
If one's own position is significantly to one side of the political spectrum, naturally the middle looks like it's on the other side.
I wonder how that strange coincidence came about.
Can't happen. Somebody is deciding to hand them money. That somebody's views are going to be catered too. Maybe not exactly, but close enough to keep the money flowing.