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The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
- averros 6y agoIt's actually opposite. The basic fundamental knowledge of biology and medicine is completely free. It's the journalist B.S. which is paywalled.
- ferros 6y agoI would be willing to pay an amount for better quality news than what can be found for free, however news outlets always seem to lean one way. I want somebody to just report and not tilt it in one direction.
- actuator 6y agoI think it is incredibly hard to not tilt one way. After all, organisations are run by humans and we all have our own leanings. It is very much possible when we hire people those leanings bias us towards a certain ideology and we may hire like minded individuals. Also, people who don't fit the ideological tilt might feel left out and may leave on their own. So, over time a media organisation will come to represent one side more. This all in addition to the biases that can come from the owners/company bankrolling the media house.
- ferros 6y agoAgreed. Even if you get past the first layer, which is to create something that sells. You’re still left with organisational biases. Then after that personal reporter biases. It would take a large conscious effort to get past all of these.
- ivanjovanovic 6y agoOne reasonable way to deal with that would be to subscribe to several sources which lean in different directions and then explore the situation from various angles.
- fredley 6y agoPay for quality, but understand the tilt. If you really want to, pay for two services with opposing tilts, but equal (high) quality.
- iso1631 6y agoIn the UK I subscribe to "The Week", which covers stories by reporting what different newspapers report. You don't get much in depth, but you do get a good cross-section of how stories are reported, and you get to remove headlines which is the source of 96% of the world's troubles.
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoWow, that sounds wonderful. I hardly read Australian news, but I would subscribe to something like that for Australian News!
- iso1631 6y agoAustrailian version shut down in 2012, when it was attracting 28k issues a week. UK version does fairly well, 3rd after Private Eye and Economist. They do a junior version for I guess 8-13 year olds too which is doing well too, so that's good. Friend of mine runs a magazine aimed at people who like horses (typically well-to-do female over 35s) with c. 25,000 copies a week pre-covid. It was about 70:30 subscription. Subscription is up a little since covid, but newsstand sales are way down.
- bitwize 6y agoWhat can I say, mate? Reality has a well-known left-wing bias. So do "the better angels of our nature".
- hootbootscoot 6y agoamazing that the truth gets flagged. shame be upon the flagger. objectivity speaks :D Interestingly, both sides of the subject of an attempted "neutral" reporting will report bias against their side. It would appear that humans avoid seeing their own implicit biases. But objectively speaking: when one political party literally rejects science, facts, and logic on a given topic, you can say that reality will be biased against them. This fact is nothing to debate, but is the intention (implicit or explicit) of such a stance. Trumpkins objectively can be said to be painting the sky green rather than admit that the sky is blue. We often go to great lengths to justify our beliefs. Ask any prison psychologists about the rationalizations they have heard for various acts their patients have committed, etc. Additionally, when "decency" and "compassion" have expressly been abandoned by the global right-wing, you can call them left-wing values by default. This is akin to Trump calling anyone he doesn't agree with "far-left" but it's expressly defined by the rights expressed divergence from these values that created this "left-wing bias". Downvoters are not using their logical brains, just knee-jerk reacting from a position of political tribalism. I'm objectively correct, as I'm merely describing the SELF_EXPRESSED DELIBERATE SELF POSITIONING OF THE RIGHT WING when they portray THEMSELVES as mean ruffians. Complain some more about people taking one at ones own word whydontcha
- HPsquared 6y agoI'm not a fan of the left-right dichotomy; it's a kind of shorthand derived from historical reasons, which encourages tribalism. Even to take it at face value, 'left' and 'right' are only directions, not absolute positions. There is no objective centre.
- SenHeng 6y agoThat sounds like the 'Reality has a well known liberal bias' joke. > Colbert then mocked Bush's sinking approval ratings: > Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias ... Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, [...] because 32 percent means it's two-thirds empty. There's still some liquid in that glass, is my point. But I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash.[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Colbert_at_the_2006_White_House_Correspondents%27_Dinner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Colbert_at_the_2006_Wh...
- op03 6y agoI use twitter for that. Don't follow journos/news orgs. Just follow topics and saved search terms.
- rvz 6y agoOn top of that, multiple sources from social media and news organisations paints the real picture of what's really going on and exposes a particular narrative and who is omitting information. The real danger is getting your news from a single social media or news org source.
- lambdadmitry 6y agoThe FT should serve you well.
- Clomez 6y agoThis is what i have concluded too. I was in similar position where i found that what ever i read it always seemed biased. FT has been very good.
- rvz 6y agoIndeed. The FT is probably the only pay-walled source I would be happy to pay for at this point.
- evgen 6y agoIt is sad that the WSJ sold out to the Murdochs and lost their way. It used to be the case that financial papers would have an agenda on their opinion pages, but when it came to making money people needed/wanted the truth or something as close as possible to this -- the market did not care about spin and believing spin that differed from reality would cost you money. I was a decades-long subscriber to the WSJ print edition and as long as I ignored the last few pages of the first section I was a happy camper. I cannot imagine what possessed Murdoch to engage in such value-destruction, but the FT and Economist are now my go-to sources for getting news that is as low-spin as possible.
- lm28469 6y ago> I want somebody to just report and not tilt it in one direction. No one on this planet is 100% unbiased. It doesn't matter if it's free or $100 per article, it's still written by a human being with personal opinions, experiences, prejudices, &c. The easiest way to get close to the "truth", which is subjective in many cases anyways, is to read from many sources and cross check the facts between them.
- raxxorrax 6y agoEven if that kind of neutrality is not achievable it has been practiced by journalists for the longest time and they tried their best. Should we forego every trial because no judge can be impartial? The argument is lacking. That impartiality doesn't lead to economic success and sustainability for outlets is another story of course. Cross checking is required even if journalists wouldn't be as active in framing stories of course.
- armada651 6y agoThe real problem is that for-profit news reporting will always start copying the biases of its readers, because that's how you'll sell more papers to them. Only state-funded news sources are imune to that, of course they have perverse incentives of their own.
- jhanschoo 6y agoPresent day, for local news, you can still get quite close to this compared to your perceived past standard. You can get as close as you can to this ideal on world news as your perceived past standard if you limit yourself to Reuters, AFP, AP. But many find these sources unengaging since they report events as they occur and do not contextualize them in media narratives to the extent that more commonly popular news outlets do.
- kasey_junk 6y agoNeutrality in reporting is a relatively new concept and was brought about by the wire services so that they could have their content bought by the broadest reach of newspapers. You will still find unbiased reporting in the wire services themselves: Reuters, AP, etc. Individual news sources have almost always been biased. This is why most cities had at least 2 major newspapers until relatively recently. You could get the liberal one or the conservative one (or in some places dozens of wildly politicized papers, anarchist papers from the early 1900s are great). Consolidation has lead to a removal of voices from most local newspapers and the market has spoken when it comes to television: people prefer partisan news sources. The internet has gotten us closer to that 1900 view but then Facebook/Google became the arbiters of news for most people.
- goto11 6y ago> I want somebody to just report and not tilt it in one direction. This is unfortunately not possible. Even if an outlet only providing objective, verifiable facts there is some angle or bias in what facts you chose to report and what issues you chose to investigate.
- quietbritishjim 6y agoOne compromise is to find a news source that is at least open about its bias. The Economist is a famous example of this: it will openly declare support (and opposition) for particular political candidates and policies.
- MattGaiser 6y agoThe Economist at least seems to be good at giving its opponents space within its pages (for those of us who still subscribe to the print edition). So while they have a bias they acknowledge, it isn't a "beat them into submission" type of bias.
- chrisweekly 6y ago"Transparency is the new objectivity."
- FranzFerdiNaN 6y agoWhat is unbiased? If you were a late 18th century french reporter writing a report about the death of king Louis XVI, would you write "King Louis was murdered", "King Louis was executed", "former king Louis executed by means of guillotine for high treason", "citizen Louis Capet beheaded on the order of the National Convention" or something else? All of those descriptions can be considered true and yet none are unbiased.
- tremon 6y agoWhat's the bias you see in the statements "King Louis was executed" or "former king Louis executed by means of guillotine for high treason"? Both the terms "execution" and "high treason" are objective descriptions takens from the proceedings.
- brongondwana 6y agoSure, but that assumes legitimacy of the proceedings, which "was murdered" does not.
- corty 6y agoNo? Treason is in the eye of the revolutionary judge. The trial was never a fair one, the outcome was clear from the start. And from an unfair trial and an unjust judgement you can't lawfully execute someone, you can only murder him execution-style.
- quietbritishjim 6y agoTo me, "executed for high treason" has the meaning that the person or organisation that killed him considered him to be guilty of high treason, and that they considered themselves to have the authority to decide to execute them, not that the paper with that headline necessarily agrees with either of those things. Similarly, a modern newspaper saying that someone "was executed by a gang for theft of their drugs" doesn't necessarily mean that they actually did take the drugs, that taking the drugs did constitute theft, or that the killing wasn't murder. So I think does count as objectively true.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoThis could be possible some 20 years ago, maybe. But these day even if you choose to just describe bare fact, you will still be criticized for the choice of words, such as "riot". Moreover, if you describe facts in full, including some background details, you will be crticized by people shouting "How is this relevant?!"
- sul_tasto 6y agoThe FT is good, as is stratfor.com
- marmaduke 6y agoYou can aggregate across news sources, eg factr.com
- lvs 6y agoThis is called "false balance." Reality doesn't have sides.
- uoaei 6y agoThe point is not to advocate for both sides, but just to tell the part of the story that both sides use to conjure their slants.
- specialist 6y ago"Objectivity" in journalism does not mean unbiased, or The Truth. Simple recipe to follow: - Show your work. - Cite your sources. - Corroborate. - Sign your name. - Admit your mistakes. Voila, you're a journalist.
- throwanem 6y agoYou want something you can trust absolutely and not have to engage with critically at all. It's a reasonable desire, but one much more likely to be fulfilled in the realm of religious faith than that of news or any other human activity.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoReuters is pretty good (at least for US and world news; I don't know how they are for UK). AP seems to me to be fairly reasonable (not dramatically slanted one way or the other).
- Havoc 6y agoAre there some sort of bundle subscriptions available? Buy all of that stuff separately won’t be cheap
- thewhitetulip 6y agoeven if there were a bundle of that, people'll still find a way to complain about it and they'd still not want to pay for news.
- rawfan 6y agoPeople always complain. A significant amount of people happily pays for Netflix and its likes, though.
- raxxorrax 6y agoSpeak for yourself, I pay for Netflix grumpily! But jokes aside I stopped paying for my last newspaper subscriptions some time ago because I just didn't find the time to read and thought they were developing in a wrong direction. I think Netflix TV shows have some kind of normalized content that I would fear would be mirrored if the service existed for news.
- thewhitetulip 6y agoYep and there are people who still complain that 1. netflix is not having enough 2. i don't watch entire netflix and the most genuine concern 3. way too many streaming services. every damn movie is on a different service.
- fock 6y agofor me as a self-declared european conservative (in the history of the social(isty)-centrist-catholic parties) this page gives hope that the USA, even if currently split in between wars of oil, race and money might still have the potential to become, what it once was: a beacon of light for any honest, community-oriented and republican (in the most basic sense) democrat.
- makomk 6y agoI think a more accurate description is that the elite narrative is paywalled but the one for the proles is free - and the elite are absolutely convinced their narrative is the truth. The contents of, say, New York Times or Washington Post reporting on the state of US Covid-19 testing and contact tracing and how it compares to the rest of the world, the evidence on mask wearing, or anything to do with Trump or protests in no way resembles the truth. Reading them leaves people absolutely convinced that - for example - the US is behind South Korea in per-capita coronavirus testing, despite this not having been true for a long time. Seriously, the number of people I've seen on here and in the Times comment section pointing to this one specific, untrue thing as clear proof Trump must've sabotaged Covid testing because there was no way that the US could have remained behind South Korea for so long otherwise was astounding - and even more astounding was the cleverness of the articles worded to trick people into believing this, or the boldness of the Times in literally printing a news headline accusing Trump of being the liar for pointing out the exact opposite was true.
- hootbootscoot 6y agoI highly disagree. Rupert Murdoch is surely one of the most elite of the elites and his vast media empire has managed to brainwash certain folks into calling his vision "populism" due strictly to his outreach efforts. It would also appear that you didn't read the article, as your point is not the topic of the article. The article is about copyright law running counter to information accessibility, running counter to an interpretation of "freedom of speech". The article is about economic rather than technological barriers to information sharing. That's the problem with knee-jerk first-paragraph-read comments.
- Legogris 6y agoI wouldn't necessarily assume that the truth as presented by Murdoch's media empire is the same as the truth as understood by Rupert Murdoch.
- makomk 6y agoThere's a reason I described the other narrative as "for the proles" and not "by the proles", you know... and the "truth" side having a business model that puts economic and convenience barriers in the way of access, so that only the people who really want to use it as their source of information and are willing to put up time and money to do so read it is a great way of turning that side into an elite thing. Also, thinking about this some more, that particular bogus fact is probably an interesting counter-example to the rest of the article too. All the information required to debunk that claim about South Korean vs US coronavirus testing was and still is publicly available for free in English, and there were and still are really convenient sites aggregating it unobstructed by barriers like copyright. Everyone in the know believed the bogus elite-narrative claim anyway.
- HPsquared 6y agoI'd like more microtransactions and would gladly pay a few cents or even a dollar to read a good article. The business model is to bundle everything together, for a long subscription - most want at least a month, perhaps a year, full subscription.
- teraku 6y agoIt doesn't work. Because what if you pay 0.5$ for an article, and then you find out it's not what you expected/badly written/... You basically are not happy and less likely to do it again. If you put payment to the end, then people are less willing to pay, because they already consumed the article. You can't take the information out of the head again if he's not willing to pay. It's a tricky thing
- Udik 6y agoA possibility would be a (global, publication independent) subscription service like this: you pay a fixed amount in each month (say, ten dollars). Then every time you read an article from a website that subscribes to the service, if you liked the article you click on a widget. At the end of the month, the ten dollars are redistributed to the publishers in proportion to your clicks. So payment is voluntary but the total amount per month is already allocated- it's not a matter of deciding whether to pay or not but just how to distribute the money.
- teraku 6y agoI fully support this. But publishing houses don't. They don't see the benefit. Also with the a volunteer voting system you could use that to signal to people without a subscription what articles were "good", "controversial", ... to increase chances of a "buy-per-page" for like 10 cents per article. Or something, I feel like the possibilities are vast, but publishing houses need to collaborate. Which they don't like to.
- Udik 6y agoNot sure what the publishing houses would think about this, but how's the collaboration needed? You can create the service and distribute the widget; and if at first it will be used only by independent bloggers I don't see the issue. More commercial players might use it too if they think it can increase their revenues- maybe test it for a subset of articles at first. I understand that the idea has tons of limitations but it might solve the issue of micropayments with their tiny amounts and the constant need to decide whether to pay or not to pay.
- luis2527 6y agoDid anyone realize that this article is free?
- ngcazz 6y agoThe amount of free content that Current Affairs has published on the website is a minuscule fraction of their print (subscriber) output.
- rawfan 6y agoI just want Netflix for journalism. I don't want a super expensive sub to a dozen papers. I want one subscription, they all should be included (maybe offer different tiers if you are an arse) and it shouldn't be more than $20/month. Go.
- rvz 6y agoApple News+?
- 5etho 6y agoand how much you think journalists should earn? 10k/yr?
- MattGaiser 6y agoNewsrooms probably pay for too many things. You could probably get most opinion for free, lifestyle content for next to nothing, etc. The weekly jobless claims articles could be handled by cheap content mills. A lot of columns like personal finance and restaurants could easily be purchased freelance on the market. The Huffington Post demonstrated that non-investigative content can be had for free. So there should probably be far fewer middle skill journalists.
- hootbootscoot 6y agoBut this is the same "race to the bottom" rhetoric that justified the entire "disruption" to the music and publishing industries that gave us Netflix and Amazon, respectively. I'm less and less convinced that we are doing the world any service by demonetizing all content and cutting the heads of all tall talent, hence the authors presumption of a sort of public UBI or other non-private-sector basis as a condition to liberating the content. The IP systems certainly are byzantine and punitive towards actual free information flow, as outlined in the article. However, if one approaches this as a typical Free Market Libertarian American (tm), as the author expressly does NOT, one arrives at different economic conclusions, and basically, journalism will not survive the complete demonetization of all content for ONE reason: content will become even more corruptly tied to out-of-band payment than is currently the case. why bother writing articles against the big bad polluter, when you can get paid to write apologism for them?
- rbecker 6y ago> Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free! As is salon.com, theatlantic.com, theroot.com, vox.com, huffingtonpost.com, slate.com, and also somehow missing from that list, CNN! I appreciate the point the author is trying to make, and realize this is tangential, but I would be grateful if he didn't try to deceive me with the choice of examples.
- fock 6y agois CNN really putting up anything except news - of which reuters/AP/UPI already give a pretty good overview for free? And while all the left/neoliberal (and clickbaity) things you noted are free, they are less concerned with news, but more opinion – to my knowledge they don't try to make the impression of a news outlet as much as the listed ones (which carry typical news-speak even in their name!)
- rbecker 6y agoAll those sites look like news sites to me, except the Atlantic, which is indeed limited to opinion/commentary. Salon's About page: "Salon covers breaking news, politics, entertainment, culture, and technology through investigative reporting, commentary, criticism, and provocative personal essays." A few titles from their site: -As pandemic spreads, feds go MIA -Did Steve Daines get pharma kickback? -The second pandemic: Pollution -Many Black, Latinx and poor Americans who needed relief the most never got a stimulus check: study -Dr. Fauci says it's not "dreaming" that a coronavirus vaccine could arrive by 2021 -The COVID-19 downturn triggers jump in Medicaid enrollment The Root has an explicit "News" section (theroot.com/c/news). Some titles from the site (not limited to that section): -Jamaica's Supreme Court Rules That School Can Ban Child With Dreadlocks (No, We're Not Kidding) -Protests Planned in St. Louis, Mo. After New Prosecutor Says He Won't Make Criminal Charges in Police Killing of Michael Brown -Brooklyn Man Sentenced to 10 Years for Hate Crime Against Black Woman -After a Summer of Social Media Trolling By Gen Z, Trump Says He's Going to Ban TikTok From America -Rumored VP Candidate Rep. Karen Bass Explains Video of Her Praising Church of Scientology, Denounces Fidel Castro -Michigan Appeals Court Grants Release of Black Girl Who Was Detained After Not Doing Online Homework Vox: -The slow-motion 2020 election disaster states are scrambling to prevent, explained -The US ambassador to Brazil reportedly asked Brazilian officials to help Trump’s reelection -Scientists have backed away from the worst-case climate scenario — and the best one too -“The end of arms control as we know it” -Polls: Biden and Trump are nearly tied in North Carolina and Georgia -As coronavirus cases increase worldwide, an Australian state is imposing tough new restrictions -Lawmakers still “not close” to a coronavirus stimulus deal, a day after $600 federal relief expired Huffpost also has a "News" section (the most prominent of all). Some titles taken straight from their front page: -Coronavirus Live Updates: Read The Latest About The COVID-19 Outbreak -Top Health Official: Time To ‘Move On’ From Hydroxychloroquine Efficacy Claims -College Athletes Threaten To Skip Season Over COVID-19, Racial Justice Demands -Watchdog Calls For Probe Amid Fears Of ‘Voter Suppression Tactics’ Through Postal Service -Thousands Ordered To Evacuate As Wildfires Scorch Southern California -Navy SEALS Investigate Video Of Dogs Attacking Colin Kaepernick Stand-In The very first section of Slate is titled "News & Politics". A few titles from that section: -The US Takes On TikTok -The Republican National Convention in Charlotte Will Be Closed to the Press -Arizona Congressman Tests Positive for COVID-19, Blasts Republicans Who Don’t Wear Masks -Hundreds of Coronavirus Infections at Georgia Camp Raise Tough Questions About Schools Reopening -EU Extends Ban on Dangerous Foreign Travelers (Americans) In sum, there's no way to claim these are not news sites.
- thundergolfer 6y agoThis is a long-ish article, as per usual for N Robinson, and I think people ITT are focusing only on the start. Yes free vs. subscription news media is an interesting and important issue, but this article goes on to make a more wide-reaching and incisive criticism of how Capitalism structures the production and distribution of information or knowledge (Current Affairs is a socialist magazine). Information production is dominated by the super-rich and the state, and access to knowledge (not merely information) is carefully controlled for the benefit of and use by the highly educated, wealthy elite. An aspect that I often think about is how the vast majority of truly top-tier multimedia (books, articles, movies) has been created decades ago. A person could, for example, spend multiple lifetimes reading the amazing academic and artistic literature in the public domain. But such an existence is terribly unprofitable, so it's heavily discouraged in favour of a content-diet full of pop-culture ephemera. Alan Kay said about Pop Culture, that it "is all about identity and feeling like you're participating, It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future—it's living in the present." Such over-stimulating, disorienting, and fashionable multimedia, perhaps perfected by Buzzfeed, is making us energetic consumers, and idiots. Amused to death drinking from a firehose of 'free'.
- fortran77 6y agoNo, they're focusing only on the title. People on HN are no better than the people who get their news from Facebook memes. They just _think_ they're better. /r/LOLHackerNews
- loriverkutya 6y agoLies are not free, they are paid by ads and a complete industry is built on keeping this going. The price of the ads are built into the price of the product/service you buy, so we are basically paying for the lies too, it’s just not as obvious as paying to get through the paywall.
- dilandau 6y agoGreat point. You could say that the "lies" are propaganda, as much as the advertisement that they are the vehicle for. Inundated with this much propaganda, which points to the impotence of the individual, no wonder we're seeing so much mass unrest.
- deltron3030 6y agoConspiracies are a never ending source for new ownable keywords and terminology, which combined with the "research it yourself mantra" only drives people deeper into the ecosystem of alternative book stores and prepper online shops etc. If people would know how the web works they'd be more sceptic about the media they encounter and their calls to action.
- shultays 6y agoThey are free for consumers
- Super_Jambo 6y agoThey're free for the consumers of lies. They're paid for by the consumers of whatever product is buying the adverts.
- andyjohnson0 6y agoI think the meaning is pretty clear. Dishonest/misleading sources of information are intentionally designed to have a vary low barrier to entry, while trustworthy sources are forced to use off-putting paywalls due to the inherent higher cost of what they do. Hence the asymmetry.
- jaggirs 6y ago
- dukoid 6y agoIn Germany, part of the problem is that old media lobbying has successfully prevented a reasonable (text based) internet presence of public broadcasting... Some Google-translated coverage: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ndr.de%2Ffernsehen%2Fsendungen%2Fzapp%2Fmedienpolitik%2FDer-letzte-Text-der-ARD%2Cardvsverleger102.html https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
- antibuddy 6y agoPublic broadcasting in Germany is no better than private media. In fact most topics are reported the same and even the opinion is the same. But even ignoring this, it is a big problem that publicly funded media is in direct economic competition with privately funded media. This is exacerbated by the official entertainment mission (Unterhaltungsauftrag[1]) and the usage of advertisement. [1]: https://www.die-medienanstalten.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Rechtsgrundlagen/Gesetze_Staatsvertraege/Rundfunkstaatsvertrag_RStV.pdf https://www.die-medienanstalten.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Rec... in §11
- seesawtron 6y agoWhy is the public funded media in direct economic competition with private media? Because the public funded media IS directly funded by the taxpayers. I can imagine they have a "popularity" competition in terms of viewership and so on but why economic? Can you elaborate please?
- marcusverus 6y agoSay you read ten articles every morning. With no public option, you read ten private articles. With a public option, you would still read the same number of articles each morning, but every time you read a public article, some private organization loses a tiny bit of revenue. Worse still, imagine you are a paying subscriber to some private newspaper. If the public option has very high quality coverage, you may find that you no longer need your private subscription.
- Yaa101 6y agoThis is why I sponsor the Guardian, they stay open and give good news.
- vixen99 6y agoThe Guardian as with other newspapers has to selectively report the news which it does using a vocabulary which implicitly or explicitly reflects their opinions about the news. Naturally the overall output confirms the prejudices of their readership. It's 'good news', they say.
- brendoelfrendo 6y agoAh yes, pesky words, revealing bias and confirming prejudices. I only subscribe to newspapers that print their headlines as formal logical statements.
- cousin_it 6y ago> Now, I am sure there will be those who argue that any universal knowledge access system of this kind will inhibit the creation of new work by reducing the rewards people get. But let us note a few facts: first, dead people cannot be incentivized to be creative, thus at least everything ever created by a person who is now dead should be made freely available to all. The gatekeepers to intellectual products made by the dead are parasites the equivalent of a private individual who sets up a gate and a tollbooth in the middle of a road somebody else has already built and starts charging people if they want to pass. This seems wrong. Longer-lasting copyright does incentivize authors more, because it can be sold for more.
- Super_Jambo 6y agoBut we are positively drowning in music, video and written words. We don't need more incentives for people to create copyrighted work. We need more effective markets for consumers to judge it.
- dragandj 6y agoWe are drowning in repetitive shit and crap, I'd say. It is hard to find good new stuff although it is more abundant than ever because people who create it do not have resources to reach the audience through all the noise.
- mlthoughts2018 6y agoAlso, an author could write books that are given to some type of trust or foundation with explicit orders not to publish them until certain favorable copyright or distribution laws are available. So it could be possible to “be incentivized” to publish new works even after you’re dead. For the estate of an author that has developed a reputation, say like JD Salinger, this would be a very smart thing to do if you wanted to influence policy beyond your death.
- hypersoar 6y agoThe typical copyright term in the US is life of the creator + 70 years. Are potential revenues a hundred years from now really figuring all that much into the price of copyrighted work sold today?
- jamisteven 6y agoI think this headline is backwards.
- williesleg 6y agoInternet = lies Media = lies Hacker News used to be fun!
- jamisteven 6y ago“History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books—books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon? '”
- mattacular 6y agoThis isn't history, it's current affairs.
- II2II 6y agoParts of the article are relevant to historical research. There is a discussion about the cost of access to academic papers, which is a serious issue and one that I can relate to. I remember trying to access a paper in an academic journal about a decade ago, and was almost immediately turned by the $20 or $30 price tag. I say almost immediately because I did some additional research into what the paper was. It turns out that it was a one page editorial! So not only would costs mount for legitimate resources for a serious research project, but researchers have to put in extra effort to ensure the resources are legitimate in order to control those expenses.
- jamisteven 6y agoCurrent affairs eventually become history, my point being that the truth isnt always the truth, its only the narrative of the winning, or more dominant party at the time.
- kerkeslager 6y agoI struggle to see how this is relevant.
- blaser-waffle 6y agoNapoleon got a citation, but who is the original quote from?
- seesawtron 6y agoAlthough the overall idea of this article makes sense but there are certain fallacies that stand out. For example, the Times article on "neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions" might not be "free" but the same article on New York Times was free. Does this imply that Times article must be closer to truth than the one in the New York Times? This assumption seems flawed.
- sandoooo 6y agohah, if only it were that easy. The paywalled stuff is bullshit too. Plus, they know they have a micro-targettable audience of suckers who are willing to pay.
- reportgunner 6y ago> 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. Excuse me but why would I want to pay for that ? I don't earn by reading articles online and the news websites are already littered with advertisements and autoplay videos. I get tracked around the web by these ads and I'm supposed to even fund that ? Thank you but I will pass. > 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. ... and can't you do the same with Infowars ? Critically read it and look past the headlines ? Perhaps the truth will be there somewhere too. (albeit as a total negation of the Infowars article)
- blaser-waffle 6y agoDon't even use Infowars and NYT in the same sentence. The NYT has some notable shortcomings, but Infowars is straight-up propaganda used by its host to shill for questionable food supplements and fake corona-virus cures. https://www.forbes.com/sites/leahrosenbaum/2020/04/09/infowars-founder-alex-jones-must-stop-selling-fake-coronavirus-silver-cures-fda-says/#76a62ef3541a https://www.forbes.com/sites/leahrosenbaum/2020/04/09/infowa...
- reportgunner 6y ago> Don't even use Infowars and NYT in the same sentence. I did not use them in the same sentence. I did not intend to support Infowars.
- fortran77 6y agoI'm pretty conservative, and I hate the antisemitism at the NY Times. Yet, I pay for a subscription because there are some basic standards to their reporting that are worth it, even though their editorial slant doesn't always match up with mine.
- julesqs 6y agoI mean we do have PBS, we just underfund it relative to something like the BBC. We probably also don't have as strong of political norms around not politicizing it so it's inevitable that someone like Trump does.
- rezeroed 6y agoThe paywalled content is not, in my experience, the truth, just someone else's lies. I use "lies" as freely as the title. "Leaning" or "spin" might be more accurate.
- rezeroed 6y agoDon't be shy; feel free to comment. This site claims to encourage conversation.
- dsign 6y agoThat's why I buy my "news" at Amazon, as e-books on the topics I'm interested, since for 99.9999999999% of the things happening in the world, nobody really cares about how many months they will have to wait for my opinion.
- na85 6y agoIf you choose to abstain from current events then you assume responsibility for the outcome. Functioning democratic societies require active, engaged citizenry. Passive, disengaged voters are what creates the conditions for Donald Trump to arise.
- apearson 6y agoThis is a terrible road to go down. Abstaining should not be seen as support.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoAbstaining should however be seen as allowing others to act with impunity.
- stronglikedan 6y agoIt could also be said, equally assuredly, that active, engaged voters are what creates the conditions for Donald Trump to arise.
- Dotnaught 6y agoThe linked article concludes: "Creators must be compensated well. But at the same time we have to try to keep things that are important and profound from getting locked away where few people will see them. The truth needs to be free and universal." Let's also consider whether lies should be made more expensive. Free costs more than it's worth.
- sandoooo 6y agoI am in wholehearted agreement on a tax on lies so long as I get to decide which articles are lies.
- lootsauce 6y agoAgain why is THIS downvoted? Am I taking crazy pills or are downvotes completely meaningless?
- JKCalhoun 6y agoPerhaps because OP seems to be suggesting: "there is no truth, facts (and lies) are relative."
- missedthecue 6y agoI think he's saying there are no reliable ways to decide whats what, not that truth doesn't exist
- Nasrudith 6y agoPoe's law I suspect despite the dripping sarcasm pointing out how stupidly exploitable and violent to the truth said "solution" would be.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoAs always, who judges whether something is true?
- dijit 6y agoThis is nothing new, the right-wing media has always been heavily subsidised. (I hate to use right/left as a term, so, sorry, but it's useful in this context). The problem is the left believes that the value of what they're saying stands by itself, facts and good journalism are important and should be valued! The right knows that it needs to drive emotion, and get it's ideas in front of people. This isn't just my opinion, this is the opinion of Eric Arthur Blair (commonly known as George Orwell), who's first works mocked a very cheap newspaper which espoused "anti-left" talking points. To quote wikipedia: > His own explanation was that the rise of the "puritan middle class", who had stricter morals than the aristocracy, tightened the rules of censorship in the 19th century. Orwell's first published article in his home country, "A Farthing Newspaper", was a critique of the new French daily the Ami de Peuple. This paper was sold much more cheaply than most others, and was intended for ordinary people to read. Orwell pointed out that its proprietor François Coty also owned the right-wing dailies Le Figaro and Le Gaulois, which the Ami de Peuple was supposedly competing against. Orwell suggested that cheap newspapers were no more than a vehicle for advertising and anti-leftist propaganda, and predicted the world might soon see free newspapers which would drive legitimate dailies out of business. Of course the free newspaper in the UK (the metro) is quite right wing, but the other papers (Sun, Daily Mail) are much cheaper than contemporaries that are not right wing (The Guardian, Independent). -- While none of these are out of business yet, it's interesting to note that the DailyMail and Sun have a significant online presence, often appearing in the top 3 search results on google for an article, sometimes being the only freely accessible version of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Politics
- irontinkerer 6y agoThe first link in the article is not a "lie". "Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets" has a RT video that shows exactly that, and links to several other confirmed Twitter accounts all stating the same thing. How is that a lie?
- oxymoran 6y agoBecause it doesn’t agree with the narrative that Mr. Robinson is trying to push.
- devman0 6y agoNot saying it's a lie, but having problems corroborating the original footage. No major news agencies are carrying it, I can't even find an AP or Reuters on it and they generally would report on this kind of thing. For instance, AP has a report of flag burning on Aug 1st, but nothing about bibles. I'm skeptical because there have been times footage from other events have been reused out of context to push an agenda. Just a few days ago Trump ran a campaign ad that used Ukrainian protest imagery to demonstrate chaos in the US, for instance.
- a_bonobo 6y agoWhere does OP's article say that the bible-burning incident was a 'lie'? New York Post says 'a bible', and your video a single book being burned, can't see whether that's a bible. The original video has been deleted (link is dead here: https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1289512762733785088 https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1289512762733785088 ) but quickly picked up by the usual far-right BS twitterati. >The fire was later put out by members of Moms United for Black Lives Matter, who doused the flames with bottles of water and stomped on the embers, so that article OP cites is outrage bait, it's not an informed source.
- rukittenme 6y ago> so that article OP cites is outrage bait, it's not an informed source. How does this follow? One faction burns a bible and another faction puts it out. How do you choose which narrative to privilege?
- gregoronio 6y agoYup. This must be why all the anti-maskers and COVID skeptics get all their news from Facebook. Truth is, Facebook isn't free either, you're just sacrificing your privacy for garbage.
- neolefty 6y agoEven access to good journalism is now related to income inequality. Very few who live paycheck-to-paycheck will pay for access to news when they can get some version of it for free.
- fortran77 6y agoThis is why it bothers me that half the comments on any article from the NY Times, the WSJ, The Economist, etc, here on Hacker News are "I won't read it! It's paywalled!" (It's laughable, too, because HN people think they're smarter than those fools on reddit. Ha!)
- IanDrake 6y agoI love it, the first example of fake news from Breitbart is true. There's video of it happening.
- andrewtbham 6y ago> it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate yes it is. I really lost faith in nyt when they ran article about running out of running out of charge in a Tesla. When they were caught red handed lying they still wouldn't admit to it. Their response was: "Problems With Precision and Judgment, but Not Integrity, in Tesla Test" They just don't get it. People are sick of their BS and they need to just comp to it and change. The days of BSing people are over. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/automobiles/stalled-on-the-ev-highway.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/automobiles/stalled-on-th... https://www.tesla.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive https://www.tesla.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/problems-with-precision-and-judgment-but-not-integrity-in-tesla-test/ https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/problems-w...
- arp242 6y agoThat's 7 years ago? I don't know anything about that entire story so I can't comment specifically, but the NYT publishes about 150 articles a day, so there are bound to be some stinkers over the years. It's not great, but dismissing an entire publication over it doesn't strike me as fair.
- busterarm 6y agoThe NYT used to have industry-leading editorial standards. Just a week or two ago in their reporting on the UFO story, they initially reported it in a "ZOMG ALIENS ARE REAL!" way, which is the most clickbaity thing they could have done...and then silently published a correction after they got the bump in views. The NYT is practically indistinguishable from (modern) BuzzFeed.
- eli_gottlieb 6y agoSeconding this. I actually pay for the Times out of sheer nostalgia for its being my hometown paper, but when they're publishing Very Serious Stories on the press-release UFO crap the government was trying to distract people with, they're doing a just plain bad job of journalism.
- ErikAugust 6y agoTrim gets around many of the paywalls on popular news sites, and uses no JavaScript or cookies in the browser: https://beta.trimread.com/ https://beta.trimread.com/ For example, the article in question is reduced from 895 kB down to 35 kB: https://beta.trimread.com/articles/30765 https://beta.trimread.com/articles/30765
- rl3 6y ago>The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free Claims the article not behind a paywall.
- hirundo 6y ago> Lyta and Brianna point out that in the real world, this justification [for copyrights] is often bullshit, because copyrights last well beyond the death of the person who actually made the thing. I oppose long copyrights, but they do increase the value of an author's work by making it potentially pay out for longer to the buyer. At least some of that value often gets to the author in the sale price. And if they don't sell the rights there is more potential value to their heirs, which has definite value to most of us.
- kyleblarson 6y agoOf course they left the Wall Street Journal (paywalled and quite expensive) out of their list because it doesn't fit their narrative.
- brendoelfrendo 6y agoAs in... the WSJ publishes lies but is paywalled? That's generally not my experience; WSJ is nowhere near where it used to be, but isn't among the trash tier of journalism, yet. The "media bias" chart from Ad Fontes media puts them at a slight right slant, with reporting accuracy more-or-less on par with publications like Newsweek, The Economist, and WaPo.[0][1] [0] Chart: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/gallery/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/gallery/ [1] Methodology: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sources/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sourc...
- kyleblarson 6y agoI was implying that the WSJ is generally conservative, and the only examples they give of free sites are (uber / crazy) conservative. I've subscribed to the WSJ for 15 years and read it daily. Their iPad app is beautiful.
- desireco42 6y agoQuite a few of media that are paywalled with supposed "truth" are usually ones that are first to support wars and military interventions. They also love to skew the truth in corporate direction. This is not to say they don't have talented and good writers who produce insightful journalism, they do, quite a lot. Excuse me for not wanting to pay or support other people's misery.
- alexashka 6y agoThe author would've been better served by pointing out the paywalls of research done in universities, funded by people's taxes. That'd be somewhat close to 'the truth is paywalled'. Newspapers and truth are a contradiction - truth is boring, newspapers cannot afford to be boring because they compete on entertainment value or illusion of 'being informed', not truth value, therefore every newspaper panders and skews 'the truth' in exchange for entertainment or 'being informed' value, that's their job. Paywalled or not, newspapers are drug dealers for the junkies addicted to a 'need to be informed'. Twitter is beating them to the punch. On twitter you can be infinitely 'informed' and be an active participant in 'informing' others, which is why journalists and 'intellectuals' can't get enough of it.
- Herrin 6y agoHe does, starting at the section that begins: > Possibly even worse is the fact that so much academic writing is kept behind vastly more costly paywalls.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y agoPlease get a library card if you wish to read quality (often paywalled) news sources for free. Your tax dollars (going to your city/county) are already paying for access. Best of all, it's digital. Your library card number will grant you huge access to all of this digitally and in near real time (e.g., the databases are updated daily).
- symlinkk 6y agoAre you referring to digital scans or what? My library card doesn’t allow me to access nytimes.com.
- UhDev 6y agoIf your library offers access it will be through a portal, you won't use your library credentials to authenticate with NYT.
- RandallBrown 6y agoIt might (depending on your library) https://www.lapl.org/new-york-times-digital https://www.lapl.org/new-york-times-digital
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y agoThe databases are separate web applications. Your username (and password) is your library ID card number, generally. When inside this site, you can search for publications (e.g., NY Times), and then filter by publication date (e.g., today), and view all of today's articles. It isn't access to NYTimes.com, but it's the same article contents accessed in a different way. You may have used these databases in school to write research papers. Public libraries grant more or less the same access to similar/same databases, if you no longer are a member of an academic institution.
- dredmorbius 6y agoFew of the sources I find most useful (technical books, academic journals, historical magazine and newspaper articles) are available even with a library affiliation. LibGen and SciHub are vastly more convenient and comprehensive.
- SamWhited 6y agoThis is specifically why I choose to support sources that don't have paywalls, but are still trustworthy news sources like Vox, The Guardian, etc. In these particular cases they do have an editorial stance that I happen to agree with but others may not, but the facts are still there and they're largely trustworthy. They're also open about their editorial stance and biases, so if you don't agree you can still get the facts and be skeptical about the editorial stance. But either way, personally I like both these examples so I try to support them instead of organizations that put up a paywall. I'm sure if your worldview is different you can find organizations that are legit but also have different funding models to support, or just learn to separate facts from editorializing or op-eds.
- starik36 6y agoI don’t read the Guardian, but Vox has a significant bias. I wouldn’t call them trustworthy.
- SamWhited 6y agoLike I said, the facts are there. They're great journalists, and they're up front with their editorial stance. You don't have to agree with it, but you can still get the facts and good reporting.
- stevespang 6y agoHeck, we need an "executive summary" for every article posted through Hacker News . . . .
- wing-_-nuts 6y agoWhen I first saw google books and google scholar I thought 'Oh my god, this is amazing, this will change everything!'. I imagined that a decade or two in the future, being able to read pretty much any book or paper I wanted for a reasonable monthly fee. The search functionality was an absolute godsend! Now? Google books has been pretty much sidelined and abandoned. I feel like I've watched the second library of Alexandria burn, and I am heartbroken. My only consolation, is sites like sci-hub and libgen have made textbooks and papers downloadable, albeit illegally. I still really wish I could search within every book.
- fossuser 6y agoI think this is one case where the end of the product is not Google's fault. Books got enormous push back from legacy publishers. They also had trouble with copyright law around orphaned works, but copyright protection increasing over time from 14yrs to 90yrs after the death of the author (and moving from requiring registration to being default) really made it hard for them to do what they wanted. It's a shame that something initially intended to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" is now used to inhibit it.
- GordonS 6y agoI still find Google Scholar really useful for searching for papers. It only has access to the full text for some percentage of papers, but you can usually find ones of interest in scihub.
- divbzero 6y agoGoogle Books in 2004 [1], Google Scholar in 2004 [2], and Google Patents in 2006 [3] felt like the golden age of Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and and make it universally accessible and useful” [4]. If you think back to the state of the web at the time, those services were expansive in their scope and ambition when they were launched. I give Google credit for continuing to run and maintain them to this day. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Scholar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Scholar [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Patents [4]: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/ https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/
- linjus 6y agoAfter reading this I feel like humanity might be better off if we have a full libertarian approach to information online, the Ross Ulbricht school of thought. Access everything that is digital at your desire. The internet seems to be driving humanity the wrong way in its current form, seeing what happens to democracies worldwide.
- hinkley 6y agoI wonder sometimes if all of those people who sat around dreaming about what the Web would do for the world ever get together and ask what the hell happened. What's worst is that a lot of these conversations happened when memory of Eternal September were still relatively fresh. For my own part, I was maybe 22, new to the industry, and had not yet begun to appreciate Carlin's, "Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist." Boy howdy. The infrastructure that grants us the Enlightenment or Democracy also, when taken ad absurbum, brings us to Idiocracy. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Turns out Reason extracts the same bargain.
- mkolodny 6y agoThe fact that I can read your comment suggests that the Web has done something pretty incredible - it has made it possible for anyone with internet access to share information with billions of people. I think that this article is written from an idealist perspective. It's asking: How can we take this accessible Web of journalistic information, and make access to it free, while still providing professional journalists with an income? The author's answer to that question is: have the government pay journalists rather than citizens. One way to make that happen could be to centralize journalism in a non-profit, Spotify-esque app, and have donors and government sponsor the app. Another similar, less ideal option is to create this centralized, Spotify-esque app for journalism, and then paywall the app. Since paying a monthly fee for dozens of individually paywalled newspapers/websites seems unreasonable to me, I don't pay for any of them. Yet, I do pay for Spotify. And if I could pay a monthly fee to read all journalism on the web, I probably would.
- hinkley 6y agoEssentially we are talking on Usenet with better responsiveness and a bit more moderation. I think it remains to be seen if responsiveness actually increases the quality of dialog (personally I suspect it's mixed; better in some ways, worse in others). That's not a lot of real improvement for 30 years.
- dqpb 6y agoLies are not just free to consume, they are also free to generate. It is "expensive" to generate true high information content, because, from an information theoretic point of view, "high information" means "surprising" which means "improbable". The improbability of high information events/messages throttles the rate of their occurrence. Lies on the other hand can be made to sound surprising and high information, with no natural probabilistic throttle. They can be generated at will, at arbitrary frequency.
- aforty 6y agoWaPo and NYT paywall plenty of lies too.
- mips_avatar 6y agoReminds me a lot of google's effort to create high-quality scans of every book ever written. They got pretty far before the publishers stopped them. They now sit on a sizeable percentage of all books published, locked away in their servers where nobody can access it.
- Valgrim 6y agoCould they still use this to train an AI model, legally speaking?
- mips_avatar 6y agoI think all they are allowed to do is sit on the data. Huge waste to human knowledge. Many of the books are out of print.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y agoIt's not all for naught. Eventually the books will end up in the public domain, and if Google exists then, can choose to make scans public.
- cbar_tx 6y agomore like "The Left Charges for it's Fantastic Narrative"
- hairytrog 6y agoThere are drawbacks to such a universal search system as described. The search is often crucial to the development of ideas. Like going to a library looking for a book, and finding a bunch of books on the same shelf or two shelfs over. You lose that with a universal search. The time and energy involved in finding things is crucial to the development and ideation process.
- keynesyoudigit 6y ago> Creators must be compensated well. How? By who?
- fossuser 6y agoI think there's pretty interesting discussion about this here too that addresses some of the article's points more directly: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i2z7i5/the_truth_is_paywalled_but_the_lies_are_free/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i2z7i5/the_...
- mbar84 6y agoI have no problem with a paywall in principle. I do have a problem with 20 paywalls for 20 sites, most of which I would only read an article every other month. News publishers need to get their act together.
- sunstone 6y agoAnd the Current Affairs site is free so...what is that telling us?
- rmorey 6y agoCurrent Affairs is primarily a print magazine (i am a delighted subscriber). They publish some (though not all) of their articles for free on the web
- clarkmoody 6y agoThe best part about newspapers is that they are primary source material when it comes time to write the history books...
- gurumeditations 6y agoCurrent Affairs should know a thing or two about lies being free...
- cs702 6y agoThe OP is a well-written, well-reasoned, thought-provoking article which I would recommend reading in full before passing judgment on it. Quoting from the first few paragraphs, which I found compelling: > 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.[a] 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.[b] > 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. -- [a] Free links: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/08/01/portland-protesters-burn-bibles-american-flags-in-the-streets/ https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/08/01/portland-prote... | https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/31/the-moral-case-against-mask-mandates-and-other-covid-restrictions/ https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/31/the-moral-case-against-... | https://www.infowars.com/nih-admits-5g-can-actually-create-coronavirus-within-human-cells/ https://www.infowars.com/nih-admits-5g-can-actually-create-c... [b] Paywalled links: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/world/europe/germany-nazi-infiltration.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/world/europe/germany-nazi... | https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/health/covid-contact-tracing-tests.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/health/covid-contact-trac... | https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/us/politics/trump-usps-mail-delays.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/us/politics/trump-usps-ma...
- Nasrudith 6y agoThe central thesis, that the truth must be paid for is fundamentally wrong. Even if many experts may require payment it is no guarantee that what is paid for is true. Furthermore payment isn't always needed to publish the truth. There are agendas which aren't neccessarily a bad thing or untrue. An honest victim of a crime or travesty would have an agenda! Anyone claiming to be a victim may or may not be telling the truth but they would not need any payment to want to have their story told! That isn't to say that unpaid could be a complete replacement but every issue cited for free could also occur in paywalled ones including nobody wanting to pay for an expert.
- passerby1 6y agoSo after reading some top comments (see Tesla review discussion) it looks like the bullshit is on both sides of the paywall. Upd: grammar.
- neycoda 6y agoThe ironic part of this is that people tend to click on things that are sensational and fake over things that are true.
- jessejjohnson 6y agoIf you were to only subscribe to one online news source, what would it be? I’m willing to lay for a single source Ethan would cover most necessary news within The United Stages.