"Access this article for 1 day for: £50 / $60/ €56 (excludes VAT)"
Man, the scientific publishing cartel is something else. Note that author will generally get exactly £0 / $0 / €0 for his text.
I guess you can't imagine a free, open democratic state with rule of law either. Because when broad, independent, quality journalism with a wide audience is gone, all you'll have to worry about is that poor cat in a tree in Ottawa.
Unfortunately that is almost never enough. If your competition is populist media financed by state-level/billionaire agendas, it is impossible to compete in the long term. We would need a complete and general ban on political financing across all media to sustain such a market.
> if we don't support truly independent, objective, investigative journalism, who will?
Like Eric Schmidt, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros and countless other billionaires through their "charities"? https://theguardian.org/
Just because they are liberal and non-profit doesn't mean they are independent, that only appears this way if you only think in the narrow confines of the Overton Window between "conservative" and "liberal" of mainstream discourse.