The country at large would do itself a tremendous amount of good learning how to read a newspaper again. That is about all I have to say on this topic today as I have made numerous posts about the biases of the various cable news 24/7's.
While I agree, it is still of the utmost importance that we revive the concept of news as a loss leader operation instead of profit based, because (A) even newspapers feel the influence of the bottom line and always have to some extent, and (B) it is not always realistic to only read newspapers anyway.
Not only that, but newspapers these days are largely digital creatures and are also utilizing a model known as "newspaper video journalism".
We HAVE a loss leader news operation in America today, but it is mostly limited to covering news directly from the House of Representatives and the Senate. It is called C-SPAN, and the model works, financially speaking, and its coverage of the House and Senate works, and works very well.
C-SPAN is a private, nonprofit organization, funded by a 6¢ per subscriber affiliate fee paid by its cable and satellite affiliates, and does not have advertisements on any of its networks, radio stations, or websites, nor does it ever solicit donations or pledges. The network operates independently, and neither the cable industry nor Congress has control of the content of its programming.
That rounds out to about 70 million dollars, a fraction of the budgets of the 24 hour cable news outlets.
Now, imagine if we were able to bump that six cent per subscriber affiliate fee to an amount that would give C-SPAN 300 million dollars. That comes to about a buck from every man, woman and child in the United States.
Small change for something that has the capacity to change the way we get our news and information.