Well this is far too long to read, driving that point home should not take thousands of words.
Mark Twain was once alleged to say: “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Seems it's been this way for a long time.
The real question is, what are the consequences of deepening the divide between the haves and the have nots and creating an even bigger cultural gap? Knowledge is power and all that, so gatekeeping access to quality information (deliberately, or as a side-effect of an economic system) kind of tracks.
Well, that is true. It is long form, but it does cover a series of sub-topics, not just the primary one.
tl;dr modern capitalism cannot provide the optimal distribution of information needed to support maximum economic output and growth.
It's really a restatement of Jefferson's argument for public education: the increased economic bennifits of an educated population more than pay for the education.
I find the opposite to be the case. The large news orgs with all the paywalls are now mostly used to push a narrative. This has been the case for years, best demonstrated by this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI
The free internet still exists, and is not paywalled.
A lot of those 'truth' sources that the author complains about being paywalled propagated the Iraqi WMD lie for years. Some still try to push the narrative that there are WMDs in Iraq.
Nah. The paywalled stuff is just as full of lies, biases and bullshit as they free stuff. It's just more polished and better marketed as a sophisticated alternative.
Back in 2020 the narrative of trusting our betters to make decisions for us due to the dangers of uncoordinated thinking and "misinformation" was even more pervasive than now. But they really expect me to believe that, say, the paywalled NY Times is a better purveyor of truth than many interesting free sources of info because it charges you? Or because coincidentally, it happens not to be right-leaning like some of the apparently dangerous free news sources this article mentions? Really? The same paper that sold the Iraq fiasco hook, line and sinker to the public mendaciously enough to make Goebbels proud is now going to be considered superior to the free stuff?
I'd actually rather trust the diversity of weirdness that comes with all sorts of free content being freely available from a range of opinions across the spectrum.. Among the frequent bullshit you can find gems of contray thinking and refreshing takes that put you outside of some idiotic bubble or another of "correct opinion", and their very freedom to express themselves as they see fit is exactly what produces such good qualities.
> Nah. The paywalled stuff is just as full of lies, biases and bullshit as they free stuff. It's just more polished and better marketed as a sophisticated alternative. ...
> But they really expect me to believe that, say, the paywalled NY Times is a better purveyor of truth than many interesting free sources of info because it charges you?
I think that it's totally valid to acknowledge these are both true:
1) So-called trusted paywalled journalistic institutions like the NY Times can have significant issues with "lies, biases and bullshit,"
and
2) institutions like the NY Times have significantly more resources available for uncovering, gathering, and analyzing information than any "interesting free sources of info."
In my experience, most "interesting free sources of info" mostly provide commentary using the output of traditional news organizations, and sometimes also repackage their output.
Personally I think the right call is to subscribe to something like the NY Times, hope/agitate for it to deal with its issues better, and in the meantime learn its biases and correct for them.
>institutions like the NY Times have significantly more resources available for uncovering, gathering, and analyzing information than any "interesting free sources of info."
I don't doubt that they do. The NY Times and the WSJ are very wealthy organizations by the standards of virtually any alternative news media source or newsletter, but this makes it all the sadder that despite these troves of resources, they still often pull out hackneyed, deeply biased reporting so boxed in by ideological walls that it might as well be useless.
The NY Times in particular completely failed to foresee the Trump presidency because of course, in their group mind, the opinion and possible motives of tens of millions of people who voted that way (for good reasons or bad) simply didn't count, and then, caught completely off guard by their enormous media blunder, the same paper's staff spent years harping rabidly, often to the point of absurdity, about supposed misinformation and foreign manipulation because they just couldn't digest that so many people would possibly have enough brains to make their own choices outside the narrative of what these relative elites expected. It's a grossly narrow, elitist point of view that has no place in a newspaper that claims to seek hard reporting of the real world.
This is just one example, but one among a number of them that make a shame of such a hugely wealthy organization's ability to do its most fundamental job of uncovering and covering controversial news instead of inventing it from whole cloth.
foxnews.com is not paywalled, but mostly spews crap to the uneducated. By contrast, nytimes is paywalled. I'm sure that limits the effectiveness of legitimate news organizations.
The author ignores the Wall Street Journal, a prominent right-leaning paywalled source, and he implies that an essay opposing mask mandates is inherently ridiculous. There is right-wing and left-wing BS, but the biases of the mainstream media are one factor driving some people toward dubious sources.
'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.'
Mark Twain was once alleged to say: “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Seems it's been this way for a long time.
The real question is, what are the consequences of deepening the divide between the haves and the have nots and creating an even bigger cultural gap? Knowledge is power and all that, so gatekeeping access to quality information (deliberately, or as a side-effect of an economic system) kind of tracks.