Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
After getting burned a few times from an easy to sign up but impossible to cancel user experience I have sworn them all off.
I refuse to support subscriptions that require talking to a person. And waiting on hold and having to navigate the operator trying to prevent you from canceling. In my experience all media and news subscriptions do this.
3 months later I needed to cancel. It turns out you can only cancel by a phone call, during their business hours on the east coast. Of course that wasn't the end because then it was probably twenty minutes on hold and fighting with. "No I want to cancel. No I don't care if you offer me a discount, I am pissed you made me call in to cancel. No I don't want to suspend I want to quit."
Swore I would never purchase them again if they are going to do something like that.
https://customercenter.wsj.com/help/article?topic=Policies&t...
They did it to me, luckily I was able to get it removed.
Also: democracy isn't dying just because media stops have the reach it once did. People will still vote, that is not being suppressed
Some would vehemently disagree with the second part of that sentence. Voter suppression is practically a plank of one of the two U.S. major parties.
And is voting still meaningful if most people are ignorant of what's happening in the shadows?
>And is voting still meaningful if most people are ignorant of what's happening in the shadows?<
Democracy is simply people voting for representatives, we have never measured ignorance of the population, hence no qualitative difference today than any time in the history of this system of governance
Well, one egregious example would be sending a SWAT team to arrest someone in the early morning because they were erroneously allowed to register but not to vote.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/08/florida-voter-fr...
Or aggressively purging voter rolls in minority districts.
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/lawsuit-alleges-ohio-illegally-p...
Or closing voting sites in minority areas.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/19/politics/poll-closures-rural-...
Or outlawing handing out water to people waiting in line to vote.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/29/josh-holme...
And early/absentee voting has been on the firing line.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/vot...
For decades much of the south was under federal oversight because the suppression of black voting rights was so flagrant that Congress passed a law to impose some sanity, but the law was significantly hamstrung by the Supreme Court in 2013.
The author doesn't have control over the paywall policy, and he probably isn't a full-time journalist. So I don't think this is as much of a "gotcha" as other comments make it out to be.
But, interestingly enough, another author wrote a very similar, non-paywalled article at https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2022/all-news-election-ar... a few years ago! I wonder if Stengel was aware of it.
A raft of subscriptions is ridiculous and dangerous. Every one increases your odds of identity theft.
And the idea is not new. "Someone" created a cool graphic a long time ago.