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No, CNN, I Am Not Paying You a Subscription Fee [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-24
And that goes for you too, Politico.
The media landscape is crumbling before our eyes. Free news, once the cornerstone of an informed public, is vanishing like the dodo bird. Want to know how bad it wants to know how it is?? I googled free news to write this article and I came upon an opinion piece at the New York Times entitled "Whatever happened to free news?" when I clicked on it when you guessed it. It was behind a paywall. As was this article literally making the case against subscription models, while requiring a subscription to read it. These days, all the media want us to pay for the news, unless, of course, you’re in the market for right-wing propaganda—because that, naturally, will always be free. The billionaire-backed disinformation machine ensures that the masses are constantly spoon-fed whatever helps their cause, at no cost to them. But real journalism? That’s become a privilege of the wealthy.
Let’s be clear: journalistic integrity is already on life support. News outlets, even the reputable ones, have sold every square inch of screen space to advertisers. There’s an ad before every video, an ad on the side of every article, ads within the articles, ads interrupting the articles, and even ads overlapping the very content we came to read. You’d think that would be enough revenue generation for them—but no. Now they want subscriptions too.
And why? Because the subscription model is the scam of the decade. Companies know that most people will forget about their subscriptions, and the automatic billing cycle will quietly keep draining their accounts. I learned this lesson the hard way with Nate Silver’s website—charging my American Express every month, long after I’d stopped using it post-election. My mistake, but I refuse to make it again.
The end result? People will click on a clickbait headline—one that often states the opposite or at least contradicts the actual content of the article. But once they click, they are met with a blackout screen demanding payment to go further. Left without access to the full story, the individual reader assumes the headline must have been true. It rarely is.
I’m done with the endless squeeze. News should be free, or at the very least, accessible without forcing consumers into a financial trap. If media companies can’t sustain themselves with ads (which they’re already drowning in), that’s their problem—not mine. I won’t be subscribing, and I certainly won’t be guilt-tripped into it by the very outlets that once championed transparency and public service.
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