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In an oligarch owned media ecosystem, with obvious corruption of the regulators (FCC, DOJ) to ensure proper use of the public radio spectrum and monopoly restrictions, having a non-partisan publicly funded independent media is vital to the health of democracy.

The US is not a "free society".

Which is why the BBC, ABC, CBC, etc exist in civilized societies.

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I think it's worth putting a finer point on the dynamic that the US's real state-run media IS FOX, NBC, and their ilk. The main power structure in the US is the corporate conglomerates, whose owners/managers may compete with one another like players of a sporting team compete with each other, but are ultimately all playing against the People. So invoking "state run media" to talk about PBS/NPR/CPB taking a little public money and trying to produce a different angle of public good rings totally hollow. If you don't like what they end up producing, you can always not tune in! But by the time you're rejecting them on ideological grounds, you should have already rejected every other single station on the air apart from community access type channels.

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