I would consider commissions and patreons supporting independent artists and journalists as equivalent to supporting most charities if you have the means, people need to eat and pay rent or a mortgage and directly supporting that I think is virtuous if you’re able to cover your family costs and savings goals first. If you don’t have the time to research independents then local news orgs would probably benefit more from individual subscriptions way more than national news corps.

Tl;Dr if people with the means to don’t pay for journalists to give them some autonomy from corp sponsors then we’ll get what we pay for