There probably is no substitute for the state paying for it. We just need to balloon NPR/PBS into BBC scale (relative to the size of the US, so even bigger) and hope for the best.

Yeah yeah, there are plenty of ways this could go wrong, but those pitfalls are not guaranteed, whereas the ways private sector journalism can go wrong have occurred in practice. So we might as well try it.

I don't disagree, but given the ideological opposition towards NPR/PBS right now from Republicans, the only way we might accomplish that is by promising to turn them into fox news.