ProPublica exists precisely because of the public directly deciding which media organizations should receive funding; they’re a donor-funded non-profit.
ProPublica exists in large part off of grant money, large philanthropic donors who believe in its journalism and very generous backing from the Sandler Foundation (which i believe gives it on the order of $10m a year). it does not really exist because of the kindness of individual small donors that you’re using as shorthand for the “public”, and if (as you suggested up thread) the public at-large was asked to fund ProPublica at the scale it currently operates, it would almost assuredly be non-viable.
So just to be clear, are you advocating for news media to not be publicly-funded, or are you advocating that all news be publicly-funded?
i think it’s perfectly fine for all news to be publicly funded, yeah