At the launch party last week of James Curran and Jean Seaton’s “Power without Responsibility” – a seventh edition of a work which has been around for nearly 30 years: since 1981 – Curran reminded us of the core intent of the book. That is, to argue that the state could be a guarantor of the freedom of the news media – and not, as conventionally argued for the past century, the market.

Re-reading it, you are struck by the urgency of that approach. Describing the book as “a long overdue attempt to reappraise the standard interpretation of press history”, they argue that the commercialisation of the press in the second half of the 198^th century effectively imposed “a new system of press censorship more effective than anything which had gone before”.

This argument has never been merely academic: the view that the news media should be backed by advertising and circulation and that any statist intervention - generally in the form of a state or public broadcaster - should be limited, reduced or even wholly cut – is presently a popular theme, almost everywhere. In a recent speech, Mark Thompson, the BBC director general, quoted from anti-public service broadcasting editorials from around Europe, all couched in roughly the same form: that is, that such broadcasting was at least potentially oppressive.

Yet the financial crisis in the news media industry inexorably pushes everyone, everywhere, towards non-commercial forms of funding: including the state. In his blog, Roy Greenslade of The Guardian spotted what is likely to have been the first US example of state backing for a newspaper in recent times – the granting of a $250,000 line of credit to the struggling Eagle Times of Claremont, in the state of New Hampshire, 75 per cent of which has been guaranteed by the state.

Greenslade quotes Stephen Farnsworth, a professor of communication, as “raising the expected objection, claiming that newspapers face questions of credibility if their existence depends on those they write about – ‘Even if the paper covers government officials critically, readers may still have their doubts about whether they are getting the full story’."

For those of us who have worked most of our professional lives in “market” news – that is, newspapers or commercial broadcasting – the Curran-Seaton thesis is disturbing. We’ve been accustomed to a kind of unspoken ideology: that is, that whatever limits private ownership, dependence on circulation and on advertising bring, private is more independent, more pluralist, less open to being suborned, than the state.

But the commercial cycle – news brings audiences, who attract advertisers, who pay for access to audiences, which funds news – is breaking. So we need a new ethic for new funding models – which might be state, but also might be cooperative, or not-for-profit institutions, or sponsored sites, or wealthy patrons. It may be that this new mix of funders will prove at least as supportive of the independence of journalism as the old.