"Sweden has a fairly free press"
That's so wrong it hurts! All our press are dependent on government "presstöd" aka handouts.
That's so wrong it hurts! All our press are dependent on government "presstöd" aka handouts.
https://rsf.org/en/our-supporters
They have the CIA vehicle for regime change as one of their sponsors, the amusingly named National Endowment for Democracy that specializes in overthrowing non-white democracies and regime change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democra...
https://williamblum.org/chapters/rogue-state/trojan-horse-th...
They also don't mind white regime change, NED, along with NATO, the US DoS, and a couple of other rather relevant names, where openly sponsoring [0] "Yat's our man" [1], who ended up becoming PM of Ukraine after Euromaidan escalated into a full blown coup.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200328203654/https://openukrai...
If the country is a democratic one to begin with, the grants do more good by insulating the press from commercial powers than they do bad in this way, in my opinion.
The complaint was that a grant from the government makes the press less free to criticise the government.
If the grant is clearly and legally bound to be determined according to a set of objective and publicly available metrics I do not see that it would be such a big problem.
Of course a vindictive government could do what they can to negatively affect the press outlet in question but similarly could a supporting public affect them.
In any case it can all be accounted and prepared for as long as the process is objective and transparent.