People can live in pretty awful situations, by that definition very few things are necessary. I disagree with the point made repeatedly in the comments here th

People can live in pretty awful situations, by that definition very few things are necessary. I disagree with the point made repeatedly in the comments here that government funded media can't work. NPR, PBS, the BBC, and CBC all routinely perform investigative reporting on the very governments that fund them. Additionally, it would take a pretty wild set of circumstances for a federal government official to squash reporting into a corrupt water board member in Utah. If that happens, maybe that stone will go unturned, but if we do nothing nearly every stone will go unturned. I would love to live in a world where it was possible not to have the conflict of interest that public funding creates, but it is abundantly clear that the options before us right now are publicly funded local news and very much less local news. I think public funding is the right answer. Maybe we'll get lucky and a plucky Stanford dropout will figure out a way to make local journalism profitable, but I'm not interested in waiting for that.