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> 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 alte

by tivert 3y ago

> 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.

southernplaces7 3y ago
>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.

by tivert 3y ago

southernplaces7 3y ago

>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.