I've regularly heard elected government representatives argue that their government should be smaller, less centralised and less intrusive.
What exactly made you think these situations were in any way analogous?
Pre-2003 BBC regularly used to hold the government to account because it was explicitly independent and it had a charter that emphasized its responsibility to the public. That kind of set up simply isn't possible if you are advertising funded - the conflict of interest is too great.
> What exactly made you think these situations
> were in any way analogous?
That's so condescending it made me cringe. As if you're scratching your head why someone would be skeptical of state-run media.I'm also not terribly convinced by "holding things to account". I'm sure many news organizations have, and many more have been accused of, criticizing large corporations for specific misdeeds without necessarily questioning the overall capitalist systems that allows them to exist. Likewise, news organizations also can and have criticized specific governmental misdeeds without necessarily advocating that the government should not be involved in specific things at all, or that some specific things should be handled by a more local government versus a national-level one.