(i) does not apply; regardless of whether you intend to argue for or against a point made in the article, you're responsible for knowing the same things about what the publishers think they said. Furthermore, even oarsman:regatta-style test bias is of negligible relevance because (ii) also does not apply; as we can see from the 2016 election results, enough people "disenfranchised" by NYT/WP/etc. policies were able to communicate effectively in other Internet venues to produce a catastrophic outcome for the old gatekeepers.
Most of the Internet comments that produced 2016 were either written by folks who'd easily pass this sort of test, or on venues that won't add this sort of test in the future; I wouldn't worry about the impact of this on dissent. If you want to fight against anything a specific media organization does, fight against selective reporting/censorship [1]; but it's not a big deal, the Internet has demonstrated itself up to the challenge of routing around it.
1: If you have a signal with 0s and 1s, and a filter that lets only the 1s through, what is the information content of the original signal? The filtered signal? Incidentally, this is also a major problem in science today.
The fee you mentioned, however, is, IMHO.
if I had to hire a scientist for a job and the only applicants that were qualified enough were white males, hiring a white male would not make me a racist sexist.
i look forward to the day when people just stop trying to correlate everything both positive and negative to race, gender, age, and any other attribute other than "are you a good person" and "can you do this job well"
But those "literacy" weren't anything even close to similar.
completely abstracted of the rest of history maybe that'd be possible. the problem is that black people in antebellum south were prevented from learning to read. so really it went something like: let's not teach black to read and then require literacy in order to vote.
>oh well. requiring literacy for something as important as an election is not obstructionist, IMHO
i would gladly wager that an overwhelming majority of voters don't read more than 10,000 words about any given election and get most of their data from television/radio/speech. so tell me why literacy is of paramount importance?
Many of the tests were so subjective they could simply fail anyone they wanted to. Especially certain groups who had just recently gained the power to vote.
"What does this remind him of? - a literary test to vote"
vs
"This is like a ...? - literary test to vote"