| | Ironically, we already depend to some extent on publicly funded foreign news media for much of our international news—especially through broadcasts of the BBC and BBC World Service on PBS and NPR. Such news comes to us courtesy of British citizens who pay a TV license fee to support the BBC and taxes to support the World Service. The reliable public funding structure, as well as a set of professional norms that protect editorial freedom, has yielded a highly respected and globally powerful journalistic institution.
Actually, a few years ago, working in security, I had three months of rotating night patrols in a vehicle and listened to a lot of BBC World Service. Then, one night, it occured to me that I was only hearing news that I wanted to hear, news relevant to me here and now. I never had to hear about bribery in Uruguay or parliamentary elections in Singapore. What I was hearing was tailored to be pleasing to me, tuned to an NPR station. It was not really world news at all.
There are examples of other institutions in the U.S. where state support does not translate into official control. The most compelling are our public universities and our federal programs for dispensing billions of dollars annually for research. Those of us in public and private research universities care every bit as much about academic freedom as journalists care about a free press.
I have a collection of academic research papers that demonstrate a clear political bias in academia. In economics departments as many as one-third of professors self-identify as "Republican" or "conservative." That's the good news. In sociology, it is usually zero, though at one large department it was one person out of 40.
Continuing on my own after a class in "Ethics in Physics" I find that research fraud and miscounduct in science is actually rampant. I have no hard figures, only my own intuition on this, but after five years of studying criminology, I can feel comfortable saying for publication here that 20% to 30% of research is fraudulent in some way: cooked data, invented data, plargiarism, and so on.
But don't take my word for it.
How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A
Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data
Daniele Fanelli (Here among several online.)
Bibliography of recent articles.
(One of many such or build your own)
This indicates that if newspapers had public funding, they might be "free" to publish "anything they want" but what they print will inevitably have even less correspondance to reality than it does now.
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