They likely don’t make a lot of money because people, including many people here, do their best to block ads and bypass paywalls. Without fail, someone here wil

They likely don’t make a lot of money because people, including many people here, do their best to block ads and bypass paywalls. Without fail, someone here will always paste an archive link or some other paywall-bypassing link. A second point (that actually justifies the practice of paywall bypass,) is that who is willing to pay for news when news outlets function frequently as PR organs for the constituencies they “cover?” The idea that you have to be nice to subjects in order to cover them is nonsense. What that actually means is that reporters lack courage or even basic training on how to get stories from confrontational subjects. So what if China gets pissed off. Publishing Xinhua-approved stories isn’t journalism, it’s PR. It’s not different than publishing DNC or RNC talking points. If all the journalists in China get kicked out, that still doesn’t preclude covering China — it just makes it harder — but it’s already hard, so there isn’t any difference. By letting China dictate coverage, that’s worse than no coverage at all since only an approved version of the story is all that gets out and people then are inclined to accept that “truth” without challenge because $some_international_media_outlet reported it. China’s obfuscations and outright lies during the Coronavirus situation makes this topic even more noteworthy — outlets promoting and parroting the CCP official line have been deadly; one example was China officially reporting that the Wuhan Coronavirus wasn’t human-to-human transmissible even after they knew that to be completely false and they themselves instituted mitigation for human-to-human transmission that, according to them, couldn’t happen. Even more ridiculously, the UN appointed China to a human rights panel on free speech.