The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free

[Nevilledog]

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalled-but-the-lies-are-free

Paywalls are justified, even though they are annoying. It costs money to produce good writing, to run a website, to license photographs. A lot of money, if you want quality. Asking people for a fee to access content is therefore very reasonable. You don’t expect to get a print subscription to the newspaper gratis, why would a website be different? I try not to grumble about having to pay for online content, because I run a magazine and I know how difficult it is to pay writers what they deserve.

But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free! You want “Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets,” “The Moral Case Against Mask Mandates And Other COVID Restrictions,” or an article suggesting the National Institutes of Health has admitted 5G phones cause coronavirus—they’re yours. You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the paywall. This doesn’t mean the paywall shouldn’t be there. But it does mean that it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free.

Now, crucially, I do not mean to imply here that reading the New York Times gives you a sound grasp of reality. I have documented many times how the Times misleads people, for instance by repeating the dubious idea that we have a “border crisis” of migrants “pouring into” the country or that Russia is trying to “steal” life-saving vaccine research that should be free anyway. But it’s important to understand the problem with the Times: it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate—though sometimes they are—but that the facts are presented in a way that misleads. There is no single “fact” in the migrant story or the Russia story that I take issue with, what I take issue with is the conclusions that are being drawn from the facts. (Likewise, the headline “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest For A-Bomb Parts” is technically accurate: the U.S. government did, in fact, say that. It was just not true.) The New York Times is, in fact, extremely valuable, if you read it critically and look past the headlines. Usually the truth is in there somewhere, as there is a great deal of excellent reporting, and one could almost construct a serious newspaper purely from material culled from the New York Times. I’ve written before about the Times’ reporting on Hitler and the Holocaust: it wasn’t that the grim facts of the situation were left out of the paper, but that they were buried at the back and treated as unimportant. It was changes in emphasis that were needed, because the facts were there in black and white.

This means that a lot of the most vital information will end up locked behind the paywall. And while I am not much of a New Yorker fan either, it’s concerning that the Hoover Institute will freely give you Richard Epstein’s infamous article downplaying the threat of coronavirus, but Isaac Chotiner’s interview demolishing Epstein requires a monthly subscription, meaning that the lie is more accessible than its refutation. Eric Levitz of New York is one of the best and most prolific left political commentators we have. But unless you’re a subscriber of New York, you won’t get to hear much of what he has to say each month.

*snip*

[intrepidity]

1. I never say this, but

I wish I could rec this a thousand times.

[brooklynite]

2. It is not the job of the news media to be the alternative voice to Breibart and the Daily Caller...

...it is their job to report the news. If you want a liberal counterpoint, set up your own "free" website.

[dalton99a]

3. Kick

[hunter]

4. Having no cable or satellite television, I can easily afford electronic newspaper subscriptions.

My wife and I subscribe to quite a few, from our local newsprint paper delivered to our driveway to the electronic edition of the Washington Post.

I'm always surprised when people tell me how much they are paying for cable television. We watched cable prices rise from $19, to $29, then $39 when we quit. We now pay $8.99 a month for Netflix over an inexpensive DSL internet connection.

Before this awful covid crisis we were frequent visitors to our public library. They have a good selection of newspapers. Our library offers many online digital services as well, including movies and periodicals. All free.

The resources are out there, people just don't know how to find them.

One service our library subscribes to is this:

https://flipster.ebsco.com/

[Nevilledog]

5. Our library doesn't have ebsco, unfortunately. Looks awesome.

[Klaralven]

6. The problem is that sites like the NY Times are attempting to keep alive dead tree and ink operation

Sites that were born digital, like Huffington Post, are less likely to have a paywall.

[hunter]

8. I've blocked HuffPost.

It just irritates me.

Huffpost has been owned by Verizon since 2015.

I avoid doing business with Verizon or Comcast, if possible. They make AT&T look good, which is like saying Trump makes George W. Bush look good.

No, I don't watch MSNBC, not even Rachel Maddow.

[TomCADem]

7. Because It Is Propaganda! Real Journalists Need to Make a Living

How many times to get you an unsolicited call offering you something for free? Do you take it?

There is a reason why propaganda is freely given; it is because you are about to be defrauded. You are going to pay for those lies in some shape or form.

Actual journalism where people conduct interviews and review documents costs money. Journalists are not very well paid to begin with, yet this idea that they should be volunteers is odd.