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Can government help promote and expand quality journalism? Too often in the United States, skeptics dismiss government involvement in breathtak-ingly sweeping terms without recourse to any real evidence. Typical of the genre is this online posting in response to the limited government support advocated by former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr. and journal-ism historian Michael Schudson (in their recent report “The Reconstruction of American Journalism”)1: “How many in de pen dent government- subsidized [or] funded news sources are there in the world? Somewhere between zero and none. Letting the government control the media is the fi rst step toward a dictatorship. ” But is this true? What happens when government helps sup-port the media? Is democracy threatened? Does the in de pen dence or quality of journalism decline? Well, actually, no, as even a brief review of the re-search on western Eu ro pe an public media, both print and broadcast, will show. Newspapers in France have received signifi cant press subsidies (among the highest in Eu rope) of one type or another since the end of World War II. These subsidies amount to about 13 percent of newspapers ’ total revenues, and yet my own research shows that French newspapers are at least as or more critical than their U.S. counterparts. I selected seven of the leading general interest, pop u lar, and fi nancial newspapers in France (Libération, L