And the protection of the sources that journalists enjoy is precisely because people leaking information to journalists are breaking laws and internal policies and would fear reprisals otherwise. This is an important counter-power.
To me, this makes sense. Literally anyone can be a journalist. Nobody elects them, and nothing but the market has any voice in what they do. I think it's better that way, too: you can see how fraught government involvement with even the most reputable state-sponsored media outlets can be.
> nothing but the market has any voice in what [journalists] do.
That "market" is pretty specific, and has a strong voice, though. Most media are owned by a few big corporations, and basically say what those corporations will allow them to say. Those who don't quickly find it much harder to sell ad space, their main source of income.
Corporation-sponsored media are structurally just as bad as state-sponsored ones. For practical purposes, they might even be a bit worse.
One way or another, independent journalism needs independent income.
I always found it quite ironic that their readership seems to feel like that guarantees impartiality.
On the subject of media bias, I suggest reading Matthew Gentzkow's work or even just a survey like this one: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/shleifer/files/shleifer_cor...
TL;DR: Nope, ownership isn't the main factor in media bias.
"As important, Gentzkow and Shapiro [6] show that, after controlling for a newspaper’s audience, the identity of its owner does not affect its slant.1 Two newspapers with the same owner look no more similar in their slant than newspapers with different owners. Ownership regulation in the US and elsewhere is based on the premise a news outlet’s owner determines how it spins the news. Gentzkow and Shapiro produced the first large-scale test of this hypothesis, which showed that, contrary to the conventional wisdom and regulatory stance, demand is much more influential in shaping content than supply as proxied by ownership."
I don't know. I had 2 solutions in mind, and the rest of your comment suggests having the readers pay for the media doesn't work. The other solution I though of was basic income (it's the solution for many things.) Looks like true independence only comes from "fuck you money", that basic income would provide.
That said, even if your quote is accurate, owners of journals can just drop support if they notice they're talking to the wrong audience.