‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ is the tagline you will see on the header of the website of the Washington Post, right before they pop-up an alert that you need to subscribe to them in order to read the article you came to their site for. And if someone shared it for free, you have to create an account to log in… so they have your info to keep contacting to try and get you to subscribe.
Its called a paywall. And the WashPo launched theirs in 2013. The New York Times had already started theirs in 2011. And while these may seem like arbitrary decisions by independent companies, when democracy depends on a free press, paywalling the info to only those who can afford $80 a year to read it, basically creates a economic demographic to whom fact-checked analyses of American and world politics is available to.
And since these two dates, the polarization of American Politics has become insane. And with the lack of easily viewable counter arguments to insane stories and theories, fear-monger media outlets of the far-right were able to proliferate unchecked, and while those of us who could afford the subscription, heard about them on NPR and almost crashed our cars in disbelief: the defacto response of liberals to the far-right since around 2015… ‘How can people believe this shit?’
And its not necessarily these two papers faults, as they were responding to something that destroyed how things were working before: Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, by Facebook and Google and a few others, that would show news headlines and sometimes entire articles, bypassing the advertising these newspapers had on-page to pay the bills. Also, the market got saturated with things like Buzzfeed, and other click-bait article factories, that did not have to adhere to a hundred-year-old standard of journalistic practices to how drool worthy one could make a headline, without the story actually being as such: ie, clickbait.
And while the papers with journalistic standards hid their content behind paywalls, new websites proliferated for FREE, sharing every half-baked conspiracy theory possible, with by 2014, 3% of American’s getting their news [1] from Steve Bannon’s self-proclaimed, ‘platform for the alt-right’, Breitbart News [2], Russian media company RT, a subsidary of Russian state-owned company RIA Novosti, expanding heavily into the US and UK, spreading Kremlin-friendly narratives [3], even hiring Larry King from CNN in 2014 [4](though the US gov did force RT to register as a ‘foreign agent’ finally in 2017 [5]), and Youtube, where folks like Joe Rogan could smoke weed and give platform to ANY person willing to sit down and share any theory at all.
And of course, the Nytimes and WashPo, as papers of record, DID critiques of all these developments, of Qanon, of the Alt-Right, of the Proud Boys, of Russian Interference in the 2016 election, of the money and alliances behind political donors, of every single lie that Trump would tell in the debates, and as president: But you could only read the article if you were a paying subscriber. To be fair, as a non-logged in viewer, you would get a number of free articles per month, but if you used them to view 10 interesting articles about other random things, and article number 11 is about a huge failure in our democracy, then you don’t get to read that. Unless you subscribe. The result: Only those with a certain amount of disposable income get access to researched information. A first in the time of the modern media landscape.
So who’s at fault? Id blame techbros. But also, id blame the ownership of the newspapers for confusing what they do with a ‘new media landscape’…as even though both a newspaper and a ‘news startup’ have a website, reporting on democracy isn’t SUPPOSED to be an investment opportunity, its a fucking governor to unchecked power. A fundamental so important to democracy, that when they FCC did the band plans allocation of the public airwaves, they reserved an amount that would be dedicated to the public interest, via the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, and thus created the basis for both PBS, and NPR, both of which were intended to follow the models of democracy-checking that the ‘newspaper of record’ model set by the New York Times had, for the new media space of radio and television.
At least we still have NPR, but they cant do the kind of reporting that a newspaper can do. Also, the republicans have made arguments to deconstruct both NPR and PBS, to make them privatized, in direct violation of the spirit in which the FCC mandated they be established.
So what do we do? I really don’t know. When a company says they HAVE to make enough money to stay in business, I get that. And I think journalists should be paid well for their work. But also, I know for a fact that I cannot afford a subscription to either the Washington Post, or the New York Times, and that also, much of the work of comparison done in fact-checking counter-arguments, can be done by looking at ALL sources involved. So if you are a Republican, are you going to want to subscribe to what you feel is a left-leaning newspaper just to fact check something you may feel is wrong? If your a political scholar, or another journalist, then yes, but actually your school or company would buy you that subscription. However, if you are a just a normal citizen, you will most likely not subscribe to a newspaper you generally disagree with on policies, just to get access to its vetted reporting of occurrences and happenings, IE facts.
Unequal access to education is something that we, as a nation, have fought hard to try make a non-issue. But if we can’t have equal access to the basic imformation required of a citizen in a democracy, simple answers to if, a politcian states ‘x happened on y date’, access to the finding of a journalist to state, verified by sources and backed by an editorial board, that ‘Actually, x did NOT happen on y date’… then we will find ourselves in a democracy, that is, much like the Washington Post tagline suggests, dying in the darkness.