Ours is an era of abundant information. With just a couple of keystrokes, readers can access whatever they might want to see, hear, read, watch, or engage with. But it is also an era of scarce knowledge. Understanding what we see requires drawing increasingly elusive distinctions between truth and falsity, fact and opinion, quality and slop.

In one telling, the rise of platforms and erosion of legacy media and journalism are to blame. To address this, many proposed reforms focus on subsidizing the news industry, believing that doing so will bolster the production of journalism and other civically valuable knowledge goods. But—as I explain below—these attempts will likely fail. In particular, structures that compel payouts from platforms to news industry actors create new forms of dependency on tech companies. They also wrongly assume that the news industry in its current form will choose to invest in investigative journalism and other high-value news. As I explain below, a different—and in some ways better—model would harness the government’s spending power to subsidize and support journalism.

First, a brief recap of the existing tensions between news institutions and platforms. The emergence of large platform intermediaries redirected reader attention and advertising dollars away from news organizations and toward social platforms. Social media exploited this shift when they throttled traffic to external websites in order to capture news organizations’ audiences and capitalize on continued engagement within their own walled gardens. With the rise of large language models and chatbots, traffic to many news websites may collapse, auguring a new era of desperate searching for new revenue streams.

It would be incorrect, however, to place all the blame for the challenges currently facing journalism on platform companies. The ownership of news organizations has shifted: Half of the nation’s newspapers are owned by hedge funds, while other leading news organizations are personally controlled by billionaires or wealthy families. News organizations have backed away from investigative journalism in pursuit of stories that boost web traffic and pageviews. Political attacks and social distrust also undermine journalism. Under the second Trump administration, federal funding cuts have kneecapped many public broadcasting stations, and FCC Chair Brendan Carr has pledged to revoke broadcast licenses as punishment for negative news coverage. National surveys demonstrate that trust in the media is both deeply polarized and on the decline.

Together, these shifts have significantly weakened legacy media’s ability to perform the core functions they long were thought to fulfill. First, journalistic institutions performed a watchdog or checking function: They produced journalism that advanced accountability and limits abuses of power. Second, news media informed the public and thereby made it possible for individuals and groups to participate in the project of democratic self-governance. Third, news industry actors often championed transparency and expressive rights, litigating significant cases to obtain access to government proceedings and records and defend the essential rights of newsgatherers. Economic, political, and technological change threaten all three of these functions.

What should be done to ensure that these core functions remain viable? Over the last several years, lawmakers have appeared intrigued by provisions that would require tech platforms to directly compensate news organizations. Several jurisdictions have contemplated or enacted one or more of these arrangements. The first generation of policy frameworks endorsing these wealth transfers were often referred to as “link taxes,” and required online platforms to pay each time they linked to news publications. A second-generation framework for compensation enables collective negotiation by news publishers with tech platforms. This type of arrangement—typified by the Australian News Media Bargaining Code, Canada’s Online News Act, and proposals introduced in the U.S. Senate and California legislature—requires platforms to bargain with publishers for the ability to link to their content.

Both the link tax and the bargaining code frameworks have serious drawbacks. Most significant is the risk that they may fail to create workable structures to incentivize platforms to bargain with news organizations. In Canada, for example, Meta withdrew entirely from providing access to news, blocking news links rather than paying news organizations. Even in Australia, where tech platforms have entered into deals with publishers, it is unclear how equitable these arrangements are: The terms are secret, and it appears that large publishing companies have disproportionately benefited from the agreements.

Relatedly, the compensatory frameworks may simply be wrong to assume that news industry incumbents will effectively advance the public interest. Even some news organizations with substantial financial backing, like The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, have slashed newsrooms and reoriented editorial pages to be more sympathetic toward the Trump administration. Nor is it self-evident that news organizations would use payouts from tech platforms to hire additional journalists or reinvest in neglected local news or accountability journalism.

A better way of affording financial stability to journalists and organizations pursuing socially beneficial journalistic functions would be through public funding, as Martha Minow has suggested. Indeed, federal funding has long been used to encourage the production of knowledge goods when market incentives fail to adequately incentivize that activity. And, as with the production of scientific research, the government’s spending power enables it to choose whether and how to support the production of journalism.

If the government created an institution—let’s call it the National Journalism Foundation—with the primary goal of facilitating federal support of journalism, policymakers would confront questions related to institutional design. Key choices include, first, whether a National Journalism Foundation ought to be public (e.g. the National Science Foundation) or private (e.g. the Corporation for Public Broadcasting). Second, the funding mechanism is crucial: As the experience of the now-defunct Corporation for Public Broadcasting underscores, the annual appropriations process leaves organizations vulnerable to instability and political whims in a way that funding through, for example, an excise tax may minimize.

The most significant set of issues concern how government funders ought to decide which journalistic endeavors to fund. The experience of federal science funding illustrates the possibility that a National Journalism Foundation could use some of the same structures to determine the merit and impact of journalistic work as it does for scientific research—namely, peer review, considerations of geographic diversity, and defined criteria for the production of knowledge in the public interest.

Comparing journalism to scientific research underscores the difficulty of bridging a system of public funding to the professional norms of a knowledge community that conceives of itself as independent. To opponents, the specter of bureaucrats weighing the social and monetary value of journalism to determine how to support it undermines the very idea of an independent press and the watchdog role we expect journalism to fulfill. To be clear, however, this tension is not entirely unique to the press. Throughout the 20th century, scientific researchers also had to determine how to maintain scholarly independence while benefiting from government support of basic research.

Journalistic institutions often think of their work as antagonistic to the government and the powerful. This conception makes state support particularly thorny, as media institutions negotiate how to reap the benefits of government patronage without becoming captured by their supporters. But accepting the patronage of platform companies is no less tricky, and in an era of platform oligarchy, perhaps even more difficult to reconcile with journalistic independence.