[skedaddle]

> The "news" in America has devolved quite a bit. We've stopped funding public news sources at the level they need

The ownership structure of most news organizations is qualitatively different now than it was in the mid-century heyday of the "independent press". Joseph Pulitzer, for example, was succeeded by generations of owner/editors with a legacy to uphold until the 90s, when JP III died and the family's media interests transferred around and eventually becoming public. By that point, of course, papers had been raising capital from Wall Street for decades already.

So they are funded differently now. The publicly held conglomerates and private equity firms that largely own news organizations today are constitutionally of managing, perhaps even understanding, the "public trust" they own. At best they're concerned with trust in the news.

The concept of public trust is a little subtle. Every news organization, in the US, is a sort of public news organization (in theory).