
The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free - praptak
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalled-but-the-lies-are-free/
======
andrewtbham
> it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate

yes it is.

I really lost faith in nyt when they ran article about running out of running
out of charge in a Tesla. When they were caught red handed lying they still
wouldn't admit to it. Their response was: "Problems With Precision and
Judgment, but Not Integrity, in Tesla Test"

They just don't get it. People are sick of their BS and they need to just comp
to it and change. The days of BSing people are over.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/automobiles/stalled-on-
th...](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/automobiles/stalled-on-the-ev-
highway.html)

[https://www.tesla.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-
drive](https://www.tesla.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive)

[https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/problems-w...](https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/problems-
with-precision-and-judgment-but-not-integrity-in-tesla-test/)

~~~
javajosh
It's a mistake to judge an organization on one, or even a handful of
incidents. There should be a pattern of inaccuracy and bias before you
"cancel" a news source.

This is one of the unsung problems of the modern world, the growing
impossibility of keeping an accurate "reputation" in your brain. Virtually
everyone and everything has been accused of being evil, in general, or
specifically. It's no longer good enough to just "have good feelings" about a
name, because I guarantee you've read something about every name that is
negative. Mere accusation is trivial to make, and society has somehow gotten
away from swift and harsh punishment against baseless accusation. Without that
(very useful) habit, the heuristic of equating reputation with number of
accusations is meaningless, and yet we all still do it.

~~~
GenerocUsername
The more you know about a subject, the more false reporting you will find
related to that subject.

Remember that next time you read news about something you are not already well
versed in.

~~~
slg
No one can be an expert on everything. That is true for journalists too.
Unless a reporter has a very narrow beat, they are going to be forced to
report on topics in which they are not fully knowledgeable. This often results
in misunderstandings or downright falsities, but on large they generally get
it right. We should certainly hold journalistic organizations and reporters to
a high standard of accuracy, but let's not throw the baby out with the bath
water because they make an occasional mistake.

~~~
stingraycharles
I consider the statement of the parent to be more about not blindly believing
everything the media reports, because it’s most likely a simplification and
the truth is more nuanced.

I personally don’t consider it the journalists’ fault at all, otherwise we
would just end up with an academic journal. It is important, however, to
maintain a healthy dose of skepticism when reading the news.

~~~
slg
I agree, but that is not in line with the comment that kicked off this thread
with this:

>They just don't get it. People are sick of their BS and they need to just
comp to it and change. The days of BSing people are over.

There is a clear difference between reserved skepticism you are talking about
and the "FAKE NEWS!" type rhetoric that has grown over the last half decade.

------
Dotnaught
The linked article concludes:

"Creators must be compensated well. But at the same time we have to try to
keep things that are important and profound from getting locked away where few
people will see them. The truth needs to be free and universal."

Let's also consider whether lies should be made more expensive. Free costs
more than it's worth.

~~~
marcus_holmes
As always, who judges whether something is true?

~~~
giancarlostoro
Another fun one I ask when someone brings up Snopes: Who snopes the snopes? In
other words how do we know they are not being biased or thorough enough?

I am not saying everything there is wrong but I have ran into weird biased
articles before.

~~~
shadowgovt
They are biased, but if the facts are accurate, that's irrelevant.

A trustworthy organization doing fact checking on one side of the aisle while
ignoring inaccuracies from the other side is preferable to no fact-checking at
all. Question is: where is Republican Snopes? It's a free information market;
why is nobody doing it?

~~~
googthrowaway42
There is no Republican Snopes because conservatives, since the Enlightenment,
don't do sense making that way (i.e. via institutional consensus). At the end
of the day unless you were personally there to witness something or can prove
something mathematically or do the science yourself, you are ultimately
dependent on some network of trust to inform you of the truth or falsity of
something. And even then "true" and "false" outside of logical and
mathematical domains is entirely dependent on ones values. That's not to say
there's no objective universal set of values.

Most people are Liberal (in the American sense) because that's what all the
organs of culture promote and reinforce. It's like the "default" position that
people adopt. I grew up liberal in a liberal household where we watched
Hollywood movies and mainstream news like ABC, NBC, PBS and I listened to NPR
and I went to school which was run by generally liberal teachers and
administrators and that's pretty much why I was liberal.

This is the Cathedral vs the Bazaar approach to sense-making.

~~~
jhardy54
You're in for a surprise when you discover Fox News.

~~~
throwaway8582
I always laugh when I see someone bring up Fox News in this context. You
realize your just proving his point, right? I can name dozens or hundreds of
major media outlets that that lean left (MSNBC, CNN, NYT, WaPo, HuffPo,
BuzzFeed, etc.), but you can only name one or two that lean right.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
Most of the "left-leaning" organizations you cite above are not considered
particularly left-leaning by _the left_. A better description of them would be
"pro status quo", or if you're feeling punchy "relentlessly pro status quo"
with a side of "pro-corporatist" thrown in for seasoning.

Now, Fox News and OAN and Sinclair are not, publically, actually the John
Birch Society, so sure, you could say "right wingers don't think they lean
right either".

Plot out a chart of US political opinion, and I more or less guarantee you
that in most things, you'll find your list of media outlights absolutely
"centrist", and the 3 I just named distinctly "to the right" of mainstream US
political opinion.

------
wing-_-nuts
When I first saw google books and google scholar I thought 'Oh my god, this is
amazing, this will change everything!'. I imagined that a decade or two in the
future, being able to read pretty much any book or paper I wanted for a
reasonable monthly fee. The search functionality was an absolute godsend!

Now? Google books has been pretty much sidelined and abandoned. I feel like
I've watched the second library of Alexandria burn, and I am heartbroken.

My only consolation, is sites like sci-hub and libgen have made textbooks and
papers downloadable, albeit illegally. I still really wish I could search
within every book.

~~~
divbzero
Google Books in 2004 [1], Google Scholar in 2004 [2], and Google Patents in
2006 [3] felt like the golden age of Google’s mission to “organize the world’s
information and and make it universally accessible and useful” [4]. If you
think back to the state of the web at the time, those services were expansive
in their scope and ambition when they were launched. I give Google credit for
continuing to run and maintain them to this day.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Scholar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Scholar)

[3]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Patents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Patents)

[4]:
[https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/](https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/)

------
dukoid
In Germany, part of the problem is that old media lobbying has successfully
prevented a reasonable (text based) internet presence of public
broadcasting...

Some Google-translated coverage:
[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ndr.de%2Ffernsehen%2Fsendungen%2Fzapp%2Fmedienpolitik%2FDer-
letzte-Text-der-ARD%2Cardvsverleger102.html)

~~~
antibuddy
Public broadcasting in Germany is no better than private media. In fact most
topics are reported the same and even the opinion is the same. But even
ignoring this, it is a big problem that publicly funded media is in direct
economic competition with privately funded media. This is exacerbated by the
official entertainment mission (Unterhaltungsauftrag[1]) and the usage of
advertisement.

[1]: [https://www.die-
medienanstalten.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Rec...](https://www.die-
medienanstalten.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Rechtsgrundlagen/Gesetze_Staatsvertraege/Rundfunkstaatsvertrag_RStV.pdf)
in §11

~~~
Barrin92
I'm German. Public broadcasting, including ARD/ZDF but also countless of local
radio station is without a doubt significantly better in quality than BILD/RTL
or other private tabloid media, and it's one of the reasons the country still
has by and large a shared reality when it comes to political discussion.

I don't think that they also provide entertainment is in any way problematic,
because entertainment is part of a cultural offering that should be accessible
by everyone. I don't really see the competition issue here, just like the BBC
they produce content, which is fine.

Has to be said though in quality it doesn't really measure up to the BBC, but
you can try to claw _Tatort_ from my dead hands

~~~
FabHK
Agree wholeheartedly. And I'd like to add that there is by no means a uniform
opinion propagated. For example, the ARD (one of the major public broadcasting
networks) hosts both the rather left-leaning "Monitor", and the more
conservative "Report aus München". However, as you highlighted, they share a
common understanding of the world, and therefore Germany doesn't suffer
extreme polarisation.

(I'd argue that the fringes, as seen with the anti-lockdown demonstrations in
Berlin recently, are actually sustained by newfangled social media.)

Links (German only, sorry):

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitor_(Fernsehmagazin)](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitor_\(Fernsehmagazin\))

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Report_München](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Report_München)

~~~
deltron3030
>I'd argue that the fringes, as seen with the anti-lockdown demonstrations in
Berlin recently, are actually sustained by newfangled social media.

My impression was that they were mostly older people (50+), and from their
style of clothing I could tell that they were mostly poor people, maybe people
who got wrecked by Hartz4 reforms in the 90s and early 2000s, and grew a deep
hate on German politics and the mainstream. Fringe social media groups and
conspiracy nuts just take advantage of pre-existing hate.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
Please get a library card if you wish to read quality (often paywalled) news
sources for free. Your tax dollars (going to your city/county) are already
paying for access. Best of all, it's digital. Your library card number will
grant you huge access to all of this digitally and in near real time (e.g.,
the databases are updated daily).

~~~
symlinkk
Are you referring to digital scans or what? My library card doesn’t allow me
to access nytimes.com.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
The databases are separate web applications. Your username (and password) is
your library ID card number, generally. When inside this site, you can search
for publications (e.g., NY Times), and then filter by publication date (e.g.,
today), and view all of today's articles. It isn't access to NYTimes.com, but
it's the same article contents accessed in a different way.

You may have used these databases in school to write research papers. Public
libraries grant more or less the same access to similar/same databases, if you
no longer are a member of an academic institution.

------
irontinkerer
The first link in the article is not a "lie".

"Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets" has a RT
video that shows exactly that, and links to several other confirmed Twitter
accounts all stating the same thing.

How is that a lie?

~~~
awinder
There's been a lot of coverage around false-flag sorts of behavior in
Portland, but the fact that this thing is being pumped through the lie
pipelines that originate with places like RT (Russian state-controlled media)
is kinda a dead giveaway.

We can get into a nuanced discussion of "is it really lying" since there's a
video, but I have not been a party to any conversations in my lifetime that
start with a nuanced discussion of "is something technically a lie" that end
with a good feeling in my gut. So that's kinda a clue that despite the
technicalities of language something uncool is happening.

~~~
luckylion
1) There are protestors 2) They are doing things 3) "Protestors are doing
things" is a lie because they might not "actually" be part of the protestors
but instead be false-flag undercover agents?

That's wild. You can't have a functioning press under those assumptions,
because you don't know for absolute certain that everything is the way it
looks. Donald Trump might be a long-term agent of the Democratic Party aiming
to damage the Republican Party. Of course, it doesn't look that way on the
surface, but you never know. Saying he's a Republican is "a lie" by those
standards.

~~~
dj_mc_merlin
There is a long, _long_ history of false-flag operations undertaken during
protests. Some caution is advised when deciding whether any one action is
taken by genuine protesters, especially when it's as comically "unpatriotic"
as burning the bible and flag.

~~~
luckylion
Obviously, just as it's important to be cautious in general when reporting on
hot issues. But to claim that it's _a lie_ because _they might be false flag_
seems ridiculous. Your reporting might always turn out to not be accurate in
hindsight, but I wouldn't consider it a lie unless you knew it to be
inaccurate at the time of publishing.

~~~
dj_mc_merlin
Agreed. I don't know the article author's opinion on this, but my personal
problem with the article is not its veracity, but that it is obviously
engineered to cause outrage in a certain group. It is nearly impossible to put
forward facts that do not tend towards a bias, but efforts can be made to
present it in a less emotionally charged way. Many comments on HN that are
factually true get downvoted because of accusatory phrasing, this is the same
in my opinion.

------
loriverkutya
Lies are not free, they are paid by ads and a complete industry is built on
keeping this going. The price of the ads are built into the price of the
product/service you buy, so we are basically paying for the lies too, it’s
just not as obvious as paying to get through the paywall.

~~~
shultays
They are free for consumers

~~~
Super_Jambo
They're free for the consumers of lies. They're paid for by the consumers of
whatever product is buying the adverts.

------
rawfan
I just want Netflix for journalism. I don't want a super expensive sub to a
dozen papers. I want one subscription, they all should be included (maybe
offer different tiers if you are an arse) and it shouldn't be more than
$20/month.

Go.

~~~
freddie_mercury
Why do you assume that $20 is enough to support multiple newspapers?

That's nearly how much the New York Times ($17/month) alone costs and they
lost money every year in recent history until 2018 and are only now turning
the corner as a business.

On the surface I'd assume that actual journalism -- not just clickbait opinion
pieces -- is going to cost you way more than $20 a month if you want access to
multiple sources.

~~~
nikol_w
This is the fallacy that led to the current broken model.

Suppose that instead of paying $17 a month to get the NYT, I pay $20 a month
to get that and five other similarly high quality news sources. Does this make
it harder to fund journalism? Not at all. The NYT now has (for argument's
sake) six times as many subscribers, all paying slightly more than six times
as much. So do the five other organizations. And, since the consumer has a
much better proposition, people who previously weren't paying will sign up and
the total pot will be even bigger. Since all the costs are fixed costs, it
doesn't matter if everyone reads six times as many articles. But they won't.
They will read slightly more, but benefit much more by having a bigger choice.

This is what we saw with Spotify. You pay about the price of buying one album
a month. But you get to listen to much, much, more. Even if you only listen to
a few songs a day, the utility of being able to choose from anything is huge.
Of course, some people used to spend a lot more each month on physical music.
But lots of other people used to spend nothing, since if you only had $15 a
month, you could't get much for it.

One problem is that the NYT, the the FT, the New Yorker, etc, each assume that
they are uniquely trusted and loved by their audience. But that's only true
because of selection bias. No one who values their output to the tune of $3 a
month is part of their readership.

In the music industry, the huge monopolists could force adoption of the new
model. But they're also the reason musicians don't make much money, since they
are now supporting two sets of middlemen - the tech companies and the 'record
labels'.

~~~
summerlight
> The NYT now has (for argument's sake) six times as many subscribers, all
> paying slightly more than six times as much.

Not really, there must be an intersection between them and we don't know how
large it is. And I don't believe there's many other magazine/news sites as
successful as NYT so the revenue number is more likely 3x~4x even assuming no
intersection and 100% conversion rate.

The real issue is that traditional media's competitive edge was its
infrastructure for content distribution, not the content itself. Sadly, people
willing to pay money for high quality journalism seems minority so its budget
is. Otherwise, ads-powered yellow journalism cannot be thriving as is. In this
landscape, there's simply not much incentive to pursue such aggregated
subscription model for media itself. Maybe there can be suitable business
models for aggregators like FB or Google, but I don't think this is what you
really want.

~~~
benrbray
I think the point is that a cheaper subscription model would bring in a lot of
new subscribers that were previously paying _nothing_.

There's a quote that goes along the lines of "those who don't read the news
are uninformed; those who read the news are misinformed".

For me, I see NYT as one of the more credible new sources, but it has a
history of bias against reforms to wealth inequality, which is an important
issue for me. Accordingly, I can't justify using it as my sole source of news,
and I can't afford to pay more than $20/mo total for this sort of expense.

So, an option to pay $20/mo for access to 5-6 different news sources would be
really appealing to me. Until then, I'll keep using my 3 free articles / month
from the random news outlets that get posted to HN/reddit.

------
dsign
That's why I buy my "news" at Amazon, as e-books on the topics I'm interested,
since for 99.9999999999% of the things happening in the world, nobody really
cares about how many months they will have to wait for my opinion.

------
hinkley
I wonder sometimes if all of those people who sat around dreaming about what
the Web would do for the world ever get together and ask what the hell
happened.

What's worst is that a lot of these conversations happened when memory of
Eternal September were still relatively fresh. For my own part, I was maybe
22, new to the industry, and had not yet begun to appreciate Carlin's,
"Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist." Boy howdy.

The infrastructure that grants us the Enlightenment or Democracy also, when
taken ad absurbum, brings us to Idiocracy.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Turns out Reason extracts the same
bargain.

~~~
mkolodny
The fact that I can read your comment suggests that the Web has done something
pretty incredible - it has made it possible for anyone with internet access to
share information with billions of people.

I think that this article is written from an idealist perspective. It's
asking: How can we take this accessible Web of journalistic information, and
make access to it free, while still providing professional journalists with an
income?

The author's answer to that question is: have the government pay journalists
rather than citizens. One way to make that happen could be to centralize
journalism in a non-profit, Spotify-esque app, and have donors and government
sponsor the app.

Another similar, less ideal option is to create this centralized, Spotify-
esque app for journalism, and then paywall the app. Since paying a monthly fee
for dozens of individually paywalled newspapers/websites seems unreasonable to
me, I don't pay for any of them. Yet, I do pay for Spotify. And if I could pay
a monthly fee to read all journalism on the web, I probably would.

~~~
hinkley
Essentially we are talking on Usenet with better responsiveness and a bit more
moderation. I think it remains to be seen if responsiveness actually increases
the quality of dialog (personally I suspect it's mixed; better in some ways,
worse in others).

That's not a lot of real improvement for 30 years.

------
ferros
I would be willing to pay an amount for better quality news than what can be
found for free, however news outlets always seem to lean one way. I want
somebody to just report and not tilt it in one direction.

~~~
FranzFerdiNaN
What is unbiased? If you were a late 18th century french reporter writing a
report about the death of king Louis XVI, would you write "King Louis was
murdered", "King Louis was executed", "former king Louis executed by means of
guillotine for high treason", "citizen Louis Capet beheaded on the order of
the National Convention" or something else? All of those descriptions can be
considered true and yet none are unbiased.

~~~
tremon
What's the bias you see in the statements "King Louis was executed" or "former
king Louis executed by means of guillotine for high treason"? Both the terms
"execution" and "high treason" are objective descriptions takens from the
proceedings.

~~~
corty
No? Treason is in the eye of the revolutionary judge. The trial was never a
fair one, the outcome was clear from the start. And from an unfair trial and
an unjust judgement you can't lawfully execute someone, you can only murder
him execution-style.

~~~
quietbritishjim
To me, "executed for high treason" has the meaning that the person or
organisation that killed him considered him to be guilty of high treason, and
that they considered themselves to have the authority to decide to execute
them, not that the paper with that headline necessarily agrees with either of
those things. Similarly, a modern newspaper saying that someone "was executed
by a gang for theft of their drugs" doesn't necessarily mean that they
actually did take the drugs, that taking the drugs did constitute theft, or
that the killing wasn't murder. So I think does count as objectively true.

~~~
corty
Depends on the newspaper. Things that the newspaper doesn't want to judge the
truth of usually get put in quotes or have attributes like "alledged" or
"supposed" added. Without such limiting additions, the newspaper is assumed to
embrace the written statement as true and will e.g. be liable for slander. The
yellow press will care more about the catchy headline than the slander
charges, so they usually avoid being precise and accept the punishment as cost
of running their rag...

------
mips_avatar
Reminds me a lot of google's effort to create high-quality scans of every book
ever written. They got pretty far before the publishers stopped them. They now
sit on a sizeable percentage of all books published, locked away in their
servers where nobody can access it.

~~~
Valgrim
Could they still use this to train an AI model, legally speaking?

~~~
mips_avatar
I think all they are allowed to do is sit on the data. Huge waste to human
knowledge. Many of the books are out of print.

------
thundergolfer
This is a long-ish article, as per usual for N Robinson, and I think people
ITT are focusing only on the start. Yes free vs. subscription news media is an
interesting and important issue, but this article goes on to make a more wide-
reaching and incisive criticism of how Capitalism structures the production
and distribution of information or knowledge (Current Affairs is a socialist
magazine).

Information production is dominated by the super-rich and the state, and
access to knowledge (not merely information) is carefully controlled for the
benefit of and use by the highly educated, wealthy elite.

An aspect that I often think about is how the vast majority of truly top-tier
multimedia (books, articles, movies) has been created decades ago. A person
could, for example, spend multiple lifetimes reading the amazing academic and
artistic literature in the public domain. But such an existence is terribly
unprofitable, so it's heavily discouraged in favour of a content-diet full of
pop-culture ephemera. Alan Kay said about Pop Culture, that it "is all about
identity and feeling like you're participating, It has nothing to do with
cooperation, the past or the future—it's living in the present." Such over-
stimulating, disorienting, and fashionable multimedia, perhaps perfected by
Buzzfeed, is making us energetic consumers, and idiots. Amused to death
drinking from a firehose of 'free'.

~~~
fortran77
No, they're focusing only on the title. People on HN are no better than the
people who get their news from Facebook memes. They just _think_ they're
better.

/r/LOLHackerNews

------
hirundo
> Lyta and Brianna point out that in the real world, this justification [for
> copyrights] is often bullshit, because copyrights last well beyond the death
> of the person who actually made the thing.

I oppose long copyrights, but they do increase the value of an author's work
by making it potentially pay out for longer to the buyer. At least some of
that value often gets to the author in the sale price. And if they don't sell
the rights there is more potential value to their heirs, which has definite
value to most of us.

------
makomk
I think a more accurate description is that the elite narrative is paywalled
but the one for the proles is free - and the elite are absolutely convinced
their narrative is the truth. The contents of, say, New York Times or
Washington Post reporting on the state of US Covid-19 testing and contact
tracing and how it compares to the rest of the world, the evidence on mask
wearing, or anything to do with Trump or protests in no way resembles the
truth.

Reading them leaves people absolutely convinced that - for example - the US is
behind South Korea in per-capita coronavirus testing, despite this not having
been true for a long time. Seriously, the number of people I've seen on here
and in the Times comment section pointing to this one specific, untrue thing
as clear proof Trump must've sabotaged Covid testing because there was no way
that the US could have remained behind South Korea for so long otherwise was
astounding - and even more astounding was the cleverness of the articles
worded to trick people into believing this, or the boldness of the Times in
literally printing a news headline accusing Trump of being the liar for
pointing out the exact opposite was true.

~~~
hootbootscoot
I highly disagree. Rupert Murdoch is surely one of the most elite of the
elites and his vast media empire has managed to brainwash certain folks into
calling his vision "populism" due strictly to his outreach efforts.

It would also appear that you didn't read the article, as your point is not
the topic of the article.

The article is about copyright law running counter to information
accessibility, running counter to an interpretation of "freedom of speech".

The article is about economic rather than technological barriers to
information sharing.

That's the problem with knee-jerk first-paragraph-read comments.

~~~
makomk
There's a reason I described the other narrative as "for the proles" and not
"by the proles", you know... and the "truth" side having a business model that
puts economic and convenience barriers in the way of access, so that only the
people who really want to use it as their source of information and are
willing to put up time and money to do so read it is a great way of turning
that side into an elite thing.

Also, thinking about this some more, that particular bogus fact is probably an
interesting counter-example to the rest of the article too. All the
information required to debunk that claim about South Korean vs US coronavirus
testing was and still is publicly available for free in English, and there
were and still are really convenient sites aggregating it unobstructed by
barriers like copyright. Everyone in the know believed the bogus elite-
narrative claim anyway.

------
cousin_it
> _Now, I am sure there will be those who argue that any universal knowledge
> access system of this kind will inhibit the creation of new work by reducing
> the rewards people get. But let us note a few facts: first, dead people
> cannot be incentivized to be creative, thus at least everything ever created
> by a person who is now dead should be made freely available to all. The
> gatekeepers to intellectual products made by the dead are parasites the
> equivalent of a private individual who sets up a gate and a tollbooth in the
> middle of a road somebody else has already built and starts charging people
> if they want to pass._

This seems wrong. Longer-lasting copyright does incentivize authors more,
because it can be sold for more.

~~~
Super_Jambo
But we are positively drowning in music, video and written words. We don't
need more incentives for people to create copyrighted work. We need more
effective markets for consumers to judge it.

~~~
dragandj
We are drowning in repetitive shit and crap, I'd say. It is hard to find good
new stuff although it is more abundant than ever because people who create it
do not have resources to reach the audience through all the noise.

------
hairytrog
There are drawbacks to such a universal search system as described. The search
is often crucial to the development of ideas. Like going to a library looking
for a book, and finding a bunch of books on the same shelf or two shelfs over.
You lose that with a universal search. The time and energy involved in finding
things is crucial to the development and ideation process.

------
fock
for me as a self-declared european conservative (in the history of the
social(isty)-centrist-catholic parties) this page gives hope that the USA,
even if currently split in between wars of oil, race and money might still
have the potential to become, what it once was: a beacon of light for any
honest, community-oriented and republican (in the most basic sense) democrat.

------
luis2527
Did anyone realize that this article is free?

~~~
ngcazz
The amount of free content that Current Affairs has published on the website
is a minuscule fraction of their print (subscriber) output.

------
HPsquared
I'd like more microtransactions and would gladly pay a few cents or even a
dollar to read a good article.

The business model is to bundle everything together, for a long subscription -
most want at least a month, perhaps a year, full subscription.

~~~
teraku
It doesn't work.

Because what if you pay 0.5$ for an article, and then you find out it's not
what you expected/badly written/...

You basically are not happy and less likely to do it again. If you put payment
to the end, then people are less willing to pay, because they already consumed
the article. You can't take the information out of the head again if he's not
willing to pay.

It's a tricky thing

~~~
Udik
A possibility would be a (global, publication independent) subscription
service like this: you pay a fixed amount in each month (say, ten dollars).
Then every time you read an article from a website that subscribes to the
service, if you liked the article you click on a widget. At the end of the
month, the ten dollars are redistributed to the publishers in proportion to
your clicks. So payment is voluntary but the total amount per month is already
allocated- it's not a matter of deciding whether to pay or not but just how to
distribute the money.

~~~
teraku
I fully support this. But publishing houses don't. They don't see the benefit.

Also with the a volunteer voting system you could use that to signal to people
without a subscription what articles were "good", "controversial", ... to
increase chances of a "buy-per-page" for like 10 cents per article.

Or something, I feel like the possibilities are vast, but publishing houses
need to collaborate. Which they don't like to.

~~~
Udik
Not sure what the publishing houses would think about this, but how's the
collaboration needed? You can create the service and distribute the widget;
and if at first it will be used only by independent bloggers I don't see the
issue. More commercial players might use it too if they think it can increase
their revenues- maybe test it for a subset of articles at first.

I understand that the idea has tons of limitations but it might solve the
issue of micropayments with their tiny amounts and the constant need to decide
whether to pay or not to pay.

------
dqpb
Lies are not just free to consume, they are also free to generate.

It is "expensive" to generate true high information content, because, from an
information theoretic point of view, "high information" means "surprising"
which means "improbable". The improbability of high information
events/messages throttles the rate of their occurrence.

Lies on the other hand can be made to sound surprising and high information,
with no natural probabilistic throttle. They can be generated at will, at
arbitrary frequency.

------
Yaa101
This is why I sponsor the Guardian, they stay open and give good news.

~~~
vixen99
The Guardian as with other newspapers has to selectively report the news which
it does using a vocabulary which implicitly or explicitly reflects their
opinions about the news. Naturally the overall output confirms the prejudices
of their readership. It's 'good news', they say.

~~~
brendoelfrendo
Ah yes, pesky words, revealing bias and confirming prejudices. I only
subscribe to newspapers that print their headlines as formal logical
statements.

------
neolefty
Even access to good journalism is now related to income inequality. Very few
who live paycheck-to-paycheck will pay for access to news when they can get
some version of it for free.

------
jessejjohnson
If you were to only subscribe to one online news source, what would it be? I’m
willing to lay for a single source Ethan would cover most necessary news
within The United Stages.

------
gregoronio
Yup. This must be why all the anti-maskers and COVID skeptics get all their
news from Facebook. Truth is, Facebook isn't free either, you're just
sacrificing your privacy for garbage.

------
gurumeditations
Current Affairs should know a thing or two about lies being free...

------
SamWhited
This is specifically why I choose to support sources that don't have paywalls,
but are still trustworthy news sources like Vox, The Guardian, etc. In these
particular cases they do have an editorial stance that I happen to agree with
but others may not, but the facts are still there and they're largely
trustworthy. They're also open about their editorial stance and biases, so if
you don't agree you can still get the facts and be skeptical about the
editorial stance. But either way, personally I like both these examples so I
try to support them instead of organizations that put up a paywall. I'm sure
if your worldview is different you can find organizations that are legit but
also have different funding models to support, or just learn to separate facts
from editorializing or op-eds.

~~~
starik36
I don’t read the Guardian, but Vox has a significant bias. I wouldn’t call
them trustworthy.

~~~
SamWhited
Like I said, the facts are there. They're great journalists, and they're up
front with their editorial stance. You don't have to agree with it, but you
can still get the facts and good reporting.

------
neycoda
The ironic part of this is that people tend to click on things that are
sensational and fake over things that are true.

------
julesqs
I mean we do have PBS, we just underfund it relative to something like the
BBC. We probably also don't have as strong of political norms around not
politicizing it so it's inevitable that someone like Trump does.

------
clarkmoody
The best part about newspapers is that they are primary source material when
it comes time to write the history books...

------
ErikAugust
Trim gets around many of the paywalls on popular news sites, and uses no
JavaScript or cookies in the browser:

[https://beta.trimread.com/](https://beta.trimread.com/)

For example, the article in question is reduced from 895 kB down to 35 kB:
[https://beta.trimread.com/articles/30765](https://beta.trimread.com/articles/30765)

------
Havoc
Are there some sort of bundle subscriptions available?

Buy all of that stuff separately won’t be cheap

~~~
thewhitetulip
even if there were a bundle of that, people'll still find a way to complain
about it and they'd still not want to pay for news.

~~~
rawfan
People always complain. A significant amount of people happily pays for
Netflix and its likes, though.

~~~
raxxorrax
Speak for yourself, I pay for Netflix grumpily!

But jokes aside I stopped paying for my last newspaper subscriptions some time
ago because I just didn't find the time to read and thought they were
developing in a wrong direction.

I think Netflix TV shows have some kind of normalized content that I would
fear would be mirrored if the service existed for news.

------
seesawtron
Although the overall idea of this article makes sense but there are certain
fallacies that stand out.

For example, the Times article on "neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions"
might not be "free" but the same article on New York Times was free. Does this
imply that Times article must be closer to truth than the one in the New York
Times? This assumption seems flawed.

------
alexashka
The author would've been better served by pointing out the paywalls of
research done in universities, funded by people's taxes.

That'd be somewhat close to 'the truth is paywalled'.

Newspapers and truth are a contradiction - truth is boring, newspapers cannot
afford to be boring because they compete on entertainment value or illusion of
'being informed', not truth value, therefore every newspaper panders and skews
'the truth' in exchange for entertainment or 'being informed' value, that's
their _job_.

Paywalled or not, newspapers are drug dealers for the junkies addicted to a
'need to be informed'. Twitter is beating them to the punch. On twitter you
can be infinitely 'informed' _and_ be an active participant in 'informing'
others, which is why journalists and 'intellectuals' can't get enough of it.

~~~
Herrin
He does, starting at the section that begins:

> Possibly even worse is the fact that so much academic writing is kept behind
> vastly more costly paywalls.

------
sunstone
And the Current Affairs site is free so...what is that telling us?

~~~
rmorey
Current Affairs is primarily a print magazine (i am a delighted subscriber).
They publish some (though not all) of their articles for free on the web

------
Nasrudith
The central thesis, that the truth must be paid for is fundamentally wrong.
Even if many experts may require payment it is no guarantee that what is paid
for is true.

Furthermore payment isn't always needed to publish the truth. There are
agendas which aren't neccessarily a bad thing or untrue. An honest victim of a
crime or travesty would have an agenda!

Anyone claiming to be a victim may or may not be telling the truth but they
would not need any payment to want to have their story told!

That isn't to say that unpaid could be a complete replacement but every issue
cited for free could also occur in paywalled ones including nobody wanting to
pay for an expert.

------
mbar84
I have no problem with a paywall in principle. I do have a problem with 20
paywalls for 20 sites, most of which I would only read an article every other
month. News publishers need to get their act together.

------
keynesyoudigit
> Creators must be compensated well.

How? By who?

------
jamisteven
I think this headline is backwards.

------
passerby1
So after reading some top comments (see Tesla review discussion) it looks like
the bullshit is on both sides of the paywall. Upd: grammar.

------
fossuser
I think there's pretty interesting discussion about this here too that
addresses some of the article's points more directly:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i2z7i5/the_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i2z7i5/the_truth_is_paywalled_but_the_lies_are_free/)

------
desireco42
Quite a few of media that are paywalled with supposed "truth" are usually ones
that are first to support wars and military interventions. They also love to
skew the truth in corporate direction. This is not to say they don't have
talented and good writers who produce insightful journalism, they do, quite a
lot.

Excuse me for not wanting to pay or support other people's misery.

------
cbar_tx
more like "The Left Charges for it's Fantastic Narrative"

------
linjus
After reading this I feel like humanity might be better off if we have a full
libertarian approach to information online, the Ross Ulbricht school of
thought. Access everything that is digital at your desire. The internet seems
to be driving humanity the wrong way in its current form, seeing what happens
to democracies worldwide.

------
cs702
The OP is a well-written, well-reasoned, thought-provoking article which I
would recommend reading in full before passing judgment on it. Quoting from
the first few paragraphs, which I found compelling:

> But let us also notice something: The New York Times, the New Yorker, the
> Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review
> of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls.
> Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington
> Examiner, InfoWars: free!

> You want “Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets,”
> “The Moral Case Against Mask Mandates And Other COVID Restrictions,” or an
> article suggesting the National Institutes of Health has admitted 5G phones
> cause coronavirus—they’re yours.[a] You want the detailed Times reports on
> neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is
> failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the
> USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll
> run straight into the paywall.[b]

> This doesn’t mean the paywall shouldn’t be there. But it does mean that it
> costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information,
> while a lot of bullshit is completely free.

\--

[a] Free links: [https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/08/01/portland-
prote...](https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/08/01/portland-protesters-
burn-bibles-american-flags-in-the-streets/) |
[https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/31/the-moral-case-
against-...](https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/31/the-moral-case-against-mask-
mandates-and-other-covid-restrictions/) | [https://www.infowars.com/nih-
admits-5g-can-actually-create-c...](https://www.infowars.com/nih-
admits-5g-can-actually-create-coronavirus-within-human-cells/)

[b] Paywalled links: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/world/europe/germany-
nazi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/world/europe/germany-nazi-
infiltration.html) | [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/health/covid-contact-
trac...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/health/covid-contact-tracing-
tests.html) | [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/us/politics/trump-usps-
ma...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/us/politics/trump-usps-mail-
delays.html)

------
rl3
> _The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free_

Claims the article not behind a paywall.

------
kyleblarson
Of course they left the Wall Street Journal (paywalled and quite expensive)
out of their list because it doesn't fit their narrative.

~~~
brendoelfrendo
As in... the WSJ publishes lies but is paywalled? That's generally not my
experience; WSJ is nowhere near where it used to be, but isn't among the trash
tier of journalism, yet.

The "media bias" chart from Ad Fontes media puts them at a slight right slant,
with reporting accuracy more-or-less on par with publications like Newsweek,
The Economist, and WaPo.[0][1]

[0] Chart:
[https://www.adfontesmedia.com/gallery/](https://www.adfontesmedia.com/gallery/)
[1] Methodology: [https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-
sourc...](https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sources/)

~~~
kyleblarson
I was implying that the WSJ is generally conservative, and the only examples
they give of free sites are (uber / crazy) conservative. I've subscribed to
the WSJ for 15 years and read it daily. Their iPad app is beautiful.

------
sandoooo
hah, if only it were that easy.

The paywalled stuff is bullshit too. Plus, they know they have a micro-
targettable audience of _suckers who are willing to pay_.

------
reportgunner
> _You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German
> institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the
> Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if
> you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the
> paywall._

Excuse me but why would I want to pay for that ? I don't earn by reading
articles online and the news websites are already littered with advertisements
and autoplay videos. I get tracked around the web by these ads and I'm
supposed to even fund that ?

Thank you but I will pass.

> _The New York Times is, in fact, extremely valuable, if you read it
> critically and look past the headlines. Usually the truth is in there
> somewhere, as there is a great deal of excellent reporting, and one could
> almost construct a serious newspaper purely from material culled from the
> New York Times._

... and can't you do the same with Infowars ? Critically read it and look past
the headlines ? Perhaps the truth will be there somewhere too. (albeit as a
total negation of the Infowars article)

~~~
blaser-waffle
Don't even use Infowars and NYT in the same sentence. The NYT has some notable
shortcomings, but Infowars is straight-up propaganda used by its host to shill
for questionable food supplements and fake corona-virus cures.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/leahrosenbaum/2020/04/09/infowa...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/leahrosenbaum/2020/04/09/infowars-
founder-alex-jones-must-stop-selling-fake-coronavirus-silver-cures-fda-
says/#76a62ef3541a)

~~~
fortran77
I'm pretty conservative, and I hate the antisemitism at the NY Times. Yet, I
pay for a subscription because there are some basic standards to their
reporting that are worth it, even though their editorial slant doesn't always
match up with mine.

------
IanDrake
I love it, the first example of fake news from Breitbart is true. There's
video of it happening.

------
rbecker
> Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington
> Examiner, InfoWars: free!

As is salon.com, theatlantic.com, theroot.com, vox.com, huffingtonpost.com,
slate.com, and also _somehow_ missing from that list, CNN!

I appreciate the point the author is trying to make, and realize this is
tangential, but I would be grateful if he didn't try to deceive me with the
choice of examples.

~~~
fock
is CNN really putting up anything except news - of which reuters/AP/UPI
already give a pretty good overview for free? And while all the
left/neoliberal (and clickbaity) things you noted are free, they are less
concerned with news, but more opinion – to my knowledge they don't try to make
the impression of a news outlet as much as the listed ones (which carry
typical news-speak even in their name!)

~~~
rbecker
All those sites look like news sites to me, except the Atlantic, which is
indeed limited to opinion/commentary.

Salon's About page: "Salon covers breaking news, politics, entertainment,
culture, and technology through investigative reporting, commentary,
criticism, and provocative personal essays." A few titles from their site:

    
    
        -As pandemic spreads, feds go MIA
        -Did Steve Daines get pharma kickback?
        -The second pandemic: Pollution
        -Many Black, Latinx and poor Americans who needed relief the most never got a stimulus check: study
        -Dr. Fauci says it's not "dreaming" that a coronavirus vaccine could arrive by 2021
        -The COVID-19 downturn triggers jump in Medicaid enrollment
    

The Root has an explicit "News" section (theroot.com/c/news). Some titles from
the site (not limited to that section):

    
    
        -Jamaica's Supreme Court Rules That School Can Ban Child With Dreadlocks (No, We're Not Kidding)
        -Protests Planned in St. Louis, Mo. After New Prosecutor Says He Won't Make Criminal Charges in Police Killing of Michael Brown
        -Brooklyn Man Sentenced to 10 Years for Hate Crime Against Black Woman
        -After a Summer of Social Media Trolling By Gen Z, Trump Says He's Going to Ban TikTok From America
        -Rumored VP Candidate Rep. Karen Bass Explains Video of Her Praising Church of Scientology, Denounces Fidel Castro
        -Michigan Appeals Court Grants Release of Black Girl Who Was Detained After Not Doing Online Homework
    

Vox:

    
    
        -The slow-motion 2020 election disaster states are scrambling to prevent, explained
        -The US ambassador to Brazil reportedly asked Brazilian officials to help Trump’s reelection
        -Scientists have backed away from the worst-case climate scenario — and the best one too
        -“The end of arms control as we know it”
        -Polls: Biden and Trump are nearly tied in North Carolina and Georgia
        -As coronavirus cases increase worldwide, an Australian state is imposing tough new restrictions
        -Lawmakers still “not close” to a coronavirus stimulus deal, a day after $600 federal relief expired
    

Huffpost also has a "News" section (the most prominent of all). Some titles
taken straight from their front page:

    
    
        -Coronavirus Live Updates: Read The Latest About The COVID-19 Outbreak
        -Top Health Official: Time To ‘Move On’ From Hydroxychloroquine Efficacy Claims
        -College Athletes Threaten To Skip Season Over COVID-19, Racial Justice Demands
        -Watchdog Calls For Probe Amid Fears Of ‘Voter Suppression Tactics’ Through Postal Service
        -Thousands Ordered To Evacuate As Wildfires Scorch Southern California
        -Navy SEALS Investigate Video Of Dogs Attacking Colin Kaepernick Stand-In
    

The very first section of Slate is titled "News & Politics". A few titles from
that section:

    
    
        -The US Takes On TikTok
        -The Republican National Convention in Charlotte Will Be Closed to the Press
        -Arizona Congressman Tests Positive for COVID-19, Blasts Republicans Who Don’t Wear Masks
        -Hundreds of Coronavirus Infections at Georgia Camp Raise Tough Questions About Schools Reopening
        -EU Extends Ban on Dangerous Foreign Travelers (Americans)
    

In sum, there's no way to claim these are not news sites.

~~~
fock
nothing in "investigative reporting, commentary, criticism, and provocative
personal essays" is, what I consider news. q.e.d.

vox.com: "Vox explains the news.". No shroud of being objective here either.
q.e.d.

slate.com: "we are a general-interest publication offering analysis and
commentary about politics, news, business, technology, and culture" general
interest is vague, but no non-commented news here either, q.e.d.

the root has a category "news", but if you visit their main page you see, it's
just a sort of "community news-ticker" (like any political page has) and I
don't see them making claims to universality.

Compare that to Breitbart mingling everything there is into their political
agend and explicitly stating: "truthful reporting", ... , "Breitbart News is
one of America’s leading news organizations."

leaves the huffpost which is laughable by design.

~~~
rbecker
> nothing in "investigative reporting, [..]" is, what I consider news. q.e.d.

At this point I don't think there's anything I can say that will convince you.

But yes, if you invent some contrived definition of "news site" that
disqualifies every left-wing site, only right-wing ones remain.

And I don't understand how that is even relevant to the article - as long as
you can "get your news" from some source, that's enough. It doesn't have to
pass some made-up purity test of what qualifies as a news site, because
readers won't be applying that test. To pretend only right-wing sites share
news and opinion for free is just willful blindness.

------
jamisteven
“History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser
is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books—books which glorify
their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What
is history, but a fable agreed upon? '”

~~~
mattacular
This isn't history, it's current affairs.

~~~
II2II
Parts of the article are relevant to historical research. There is a
discussion about the cost of access to academic papers, which is a serious
issue and one that I can relate to. I remember trying to access a paper in an
academic journal about a decade ago, and was almost immediately turned by the
$20 or $30 price tag. I say almost immediately because I did some additional
research into what the paper was. It turns out that it was a one page
editorial! So not only would costs mount for legitimate resources for a
serious research project, but researchers have to put in extra effort to
ensure the resources are legitimate in order to control those expenses.

