The cultural perspective is widespread and it's at the core of many Americans' cynical approach to the government. "We're from the government and we're here to help" are genuinely scary words to these people; they have not bought into the idea of government as a social contract, or the idea that a consensus of principles could lead to publicly funded media without excessive political bias. Instead, many Americans view government as a necessary evil that we only institute to restrain our worst vices, and if the government shows up, it's because something went badly wrong; that the best government is no government, which we would have if we acted morally.
In my experience the opposite is true.
eg in Austria:
* politicans aren't allowed to interfere w/ the state owned programming and it's usually deeply rooted opinion in those institutes to be independent - they are a service to the people of the country not the current government
* private media are usually considered to be in favor of the party that pays them the most in ad spending and follows their own political agendas
* state owned news shows are usually known to be more critical (we done the research, stop BSing please) towards politicians than private ones (which politicians obviously consider unfair)
obviously in reality everything is shades of grey and not black/white. eg journalists still tend to have own political worldviews and report biased with them. but state owned doesn't by default mean propaganda channel.
Many forms are possible: the British BBC single broadcaster model to the fragmented model of my country with many competing broadcasting associations. I think most models work out well enough.
Of course, comparing to Pravda is a straw man argument: I was promoting a balance between (independent) public and commercial media
I'm tempted to say "Why do so many Americans hate America?" It seems like a sort of anti-national nationalism.
The real question is why they settle for this.
Look at the recent elections, those two people were supposed to be the best candidate options for presidency from the entire population? Really none of the people in the entire nation were better suited for this job?
... on the other hand, the two-party system in the UK is not much better, but they still manage to have the publicly funded BBC. fortunately :)
NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered news magazine programmes are the 2nd and 3rd highest rated radio programmes by listenership.
(Rush Limbaugh comes in 1st.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-listened-to_rad...
Also all the other media organizations funded by the National Endowment for Democracy?
Left - liberal. Right - conservative. Up - authoritarian. Down - libertarian.
One can be in the upper left quadrant.
I make no claims that they are and offer no opinion concerning NPR/PBS.
Meh, it is eating my formatting.
In the US, it seems that news/stories/investigative reporting without some commercial interest to some company tends to go underreported. There is no money in being critical towards business (except extreme cases) for the media companies, who depend on good corporate relations for advertising income. Critical reporting towards businesses is not happening and government mistrust is promoted with nothing to balance this.
I think that a healthy media climate needs a mix of commercial and public journalism, that balance each other out.
As someone living in the Netherlands, there are several popular TV shows on public TV that, I think, could never exist in the US, because they would be seen as harming corporate interest. An example being a program investigating the background, production and health aspects of all kinds of food.