Index

Are We Willing to Pay for News?

This article started as a reply/comment to a Dan Rather article on Substack in which he asks whether we are willing to pay to receive news. In it, he points out that while we can get all the lies we care to for free all over the web, reputable news sources all want us to pay for access. He references another article in Current Affairs hat explores the problem in some detail as well. Full disclosure: I pay for a full subscription to the New York Times, paper and internet versions. I like getting the facts straight.

One small quibble I had with the articles’ premises - the lies are not free. They are paid for by crooks that profit handsomely from them directly. My favorite example is the fright-wing sewage that comes out of institutions that consume many millions of dollars from the Koch organizations. These propaganda puppets were founded and are funded by John Birchers to bash global warming and (more generally) scientific credibility overall.

The fact that the lies can be slickly produced and widely distributed at no cost to the end consumer is because of the enormous profits that the billionaires make from the continuation (in this case) of the public’s forced consumption of fossil fuels when there are no alternatives available. It is a lot cheaper to suppress the other options by controlling the dialogue than it would be to defend their position legitimately. Nobody and nothing keeps them honest except for a few intellectuals and journalists that the professional liars have made it their business to discredit and/or suppress.

If there was indeed a legitimate government in the US that did its job on the education and information front, we would also have (at a minimum) a government paid-for “real” news service on the BBC model. This would be able to keep real news in front of the public on the TV and internet. Since the fascists have been slowly taking over all of the US’s governing bodies since the 1970s, the political possibility of a “socialized” truth provider is effectively zero right now, and with it the chances that legitimate journalists and content creators could make more than a marginal living.

With few exceptions, the private media - all of it - has been bought up and controlled by the same interests that push the fascist agenda. Legitimate news reportage has completely vanished, replaced by fluffy garbage and fascist propaganda - prime examples are Fox and Sinclair, but all media outlets suffer from it to some degree. Corporations and their fascist agenda have also taken over the academic community by being the only source of funds for them in the absence of government money, effectively “buying” all of the output of what used to be this country’s real research engines. This bit of shortsightedness has forced what used to be almost an American monopoly on real research and development overseas. China has figured this out and is taking full advantage of it.

Corporate fascists and their purchased politicians created the current terrible situation; there is very little we as citizens can do individually except try to spread our little pieces of the truth as far as possible. While the current President is a bright spot in this nightmare, like Obama, he can’t even begin to repair the situation after a half-century of corruption and decay.