Media Nation, my ex-colleague Dan Kennedy's blog, is a must-read for people interested in the evolution of media. And Kennedy had an interesting post yesterday exploring the usefulness and legitimacy of government support* for public-interest reporting. An excerpt:

What role should the government have in preserving public-interest journalism? If you’re a First Amendment absolutist (and I consider myself to be pretty close), you might immediately respond with a resounding “none.” Yet such purity has never been the reality in American life.

Heavy postal subsidies from the earliest days of the republic helped create the most vibrant newspaper and magazine industry in the world. To bring matters up to the present, media corporations are now given virtually free use of the broadcast airwaves, theoretically owned by all of us, with little expectation that they will fulfill the public-interest obligations that were once required of them.

Earlier today, John Nichols and Robert McChesney visited Northeastern to promote their new book, “The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again.” (You can read excerpts of it here and here.) I won’t pretend to write an objective account — I introduced them, and we all said nice things about each other. Rather, I want to discuss briefly their idea that at a time when journalism is in crisis, government ought to step in and prop it up to the tune of some $30 billion a year — a number they say correlates, in 2010 dollars, with what was spent on postal subsidies in the 1840s.

Kennedy isn't convinced of the merits of the idea proposed by Nichols and McChesney. Read his whole post for the details.

* My fellow student journalists and I, as a long-ago undergrad, were aghast when former Boston mayor-turned BU professor Kevin White asked about the validity of government-supported media. He then rolled out the BBC as an example of how it can work in the public interest.