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Comment by dimitrios1 | Hacker News Reader

PSA: (National) Newspapers incite rage for clicks and revenue generation, and serve as a propagandizing arm for our beloved 3 letter agencies. Their services are essential for ensuring the success of our neoconservative war hawks in Washington to continue to fund their war machine with hundreds of billions of dollars while neglecting more pressing matters like our nation's crumbling infrastructure and completely unaffordable healthcare system. So please help society by becoming a well-informed citizen, and taking everything someone is trying to sell you as the truth with a heavy grain of salt.

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I completely agree with your "grain of salt" advice. That said, to lean towards well-informed and away from rage and propaganda, I suggest subscribing to long-form periodicals, and avoiding "here's today's list of horrible things that happened in the world" style publications.

I was careful to add "national" newspapers since those are the primary targets of those who seek to propagandize. I find immense value in a local newspaper that informs the citizens of new or upcoming policy changes, development, and other matters that are more likely to directly impact your life. Support your local papers!

And what headline are they supposed to run with long-standing, systemic issues? “US Healthcare System Still Bad”? News is about current events. Things happening, not the state of the world as a whole.

If you don’t have newspapers, who are you becoming “well-informed” from? Journalists do the work of combing over government press releases, financial data, sourcing, interviews with relevant parties, etc. If they aren’t doing this, who is? The thing is, all of the more partisan news outlets whether Fox or Jacobin, get their base facts somewhere and if it is not their own reporters doing the grunt work, they are sourcing the actual base “facts” from the reporters you don’t seem to recognize.

Yes. Continue to run those headlines until the status quo changes. These are active situations that continue get worse, and continue to currently negatively affect the majority of US citizens. The apathy is part of the reason nothing has improved. It's like we gave up. If you don't keep trying to improve, the revolutionaries will come, and no one will be able to defend what we have against them.

The free press is the only private organization mentioned in the US Constitution and often called the fourth branch of government because of the oversight that it provides.

This doesn't really hold up in a conversation about paywalls. Clickbate generated ad revenues isn't typically from sites funded by subscriptions. Subscriptions actually help fight that.

This isn't really true. Almost every major newspaper posts op ed, letter to the editor, or opinion pieces that are often clickbait. They are okay with it because it gets views, and they can say, "Oh that was just an opinion piece, not our actual views" if it goes sideways.

It’s not just clickbait though. If the US wants a war, chances are most mainstream news organizations will all agree. If the US wants to expand the surveillance state, most mainstream news will tell us why it’s necessary. If the US wants to deregulate, most mainstream news will tell us how that regulation was actually hurting the economy.

I’m tired of the “good news is worth paying for” argument. I don’t disagree with that idea, but I think it’s time for a lot of the mainstream news organizations that people suggest I pay for to die. They had their time, things have changed, and they are failing to adapt. Let’s try something new.

Wait...so news orgs are bad but good enough to read if it's free?

If they truly are bad you need a site blocker, not a paywall bypasser.

Trying something new would be starting up a news org, not coding a paywall bypasser.

People should just admit that they are cheap.

it is fine, Biden said all of this will be fixed in the union speech. Like Trudeau in Canada, he says all the right thing, hard to disagree with him... let's see if the action will follow the words. Personally, I am disillusioned with all of this mess, NATO just pushing forward for decades, now we are in this mess and the ukranian people will be used as "chair à canon" and the russian people will be broke to an extent hard to conceive, even for the low tier of poor american people, which I am also sympathetic too. what a mess.

/rant

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