That's the difference between state funded media, and state run media.
State funded media are news orgs that 100% run themselves, but are funded by the government. This is great for achieving good journalism because they're not incentivised to write clickbait or take advantage of outrage and bias generating sales to people that agree with the bias.
State run media is a terrible idea, for obvious reasons.
Plenty of well functioning democracies have the former, and it's important to identify if there's ever an attempt by the government to turn it in to the latter.
That might be true, but I suspect in reality it works out because:
"Good" governance doesn't want to meddle with the state funded media, and the existence of the state funded media results in a better informed population who continue to vote for governance that doesn't meddle with the state funded media.
If a new government did start meddling with the state funded media word would get out pretty quickly because all the people it's staffed with are used to not being meddled with and someone would blow the whistle.
Or phrased in another way: state funded, but not state controlled media is a symptom of quality governance as much as it is a reinforcing factor of quality governance.
They're critical at the surface but when it comes to the government's cute agents they are in lock step. They're really pushing anti Russia propaganda right now for example.
How do you classify something as anti Russia propoganda vs just reporting on things that Russia is doing? Russia is not exactly a good actor in global politics (or towards their own citizens), so obviously reporting on their actions is going to be negative a lot of the time.
