In Feb. 2017, The Washington Post, a legacy American newspaper with millions of readers, changed its slogan to “democracy dies in darkness.”
The meaning and intention behind this slogan is clear: the journalism that The Washington Post exemplifies, according to its own editorial board at least, is integral to the security of a free society. And yet…
The Post‘s online platform has had a paywall in place since 2013. For those not familiar with Internet parlance, a paywall is an obtrusive pop-up that displays in a browser and prevents users of a website from viewing further content until they either log in to verify a subscription or purchase one.
The going rate for a subscription to the Post is $9.99 a month, although if you’re one of the millions of Americans that has already purchased another of Jeff Bezos’ products (Amazon Prime) you can cut that down to $3.99 a month after a six month free trial.
In other words, democracy may be dying in darkness, but the price to dispel that darkness is $10 a month.
Now, I want to be clear about something before I go any further with my critique. I do not begrudge the Post for their decision to make their content subscription-based. After all, you’d be hard-pressed to find any magazine or newspaper before the advent of the Internet that allowed you to just peruse the whole thing cover-to-cover for free. That’s a terrible business model. It’s also not a matter of the Post just being greedy. After all, there are staff writers and editors who have salaries that need to be paid.
What I will say, however, is if legacy media (and here I include also The New York Times and other such outlets) want to actually build bridges and reinforce democratic norms, their decision to erect a paywall is actually making the situation worse.
To illustrate my point, I will take an argument that members of the liberal intelligentsia that populate the staffs of these prestigious newspapers will understand. Having the correct opinions, that is to say progressive opinions, in the America of 2020, is a matter of social privilege. This is clear from the way that these newspaper themselves operate. In 2018, The New York Times hired Sarah Jeong, an Asian American journalist who had been documented making disparaging, some might say racist remarks towards white people. The Times decided to defend their hiring of Jeong, and while she was removed from the editorial board in 2019, to the best of my ability to find out, I must conclude that she still works for The Times.
Compare this to the circus that ensued when Tom Cotton, a sitting United States senator who wrote an op-ed calling for the use of federal troops to quell destructive riots. After the publication of the op-ed, The Times faced a staff revolt and the editor of the opinion page resigned. In other words, the opinion editor, for even daring to run such a piece, was railroaded out of the job by the rest of the staff. Much to their credit, they subsequently published two dissenting pieces by Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens in support of Cotton’s right to air his views, views that Stephens pointed out were held by a significant portion of Americans. Nevertheless, these two episodes taken together demonstrate the kind of deference that elite newsrooms hold for ideological progressives.
Given the obvious privilege that progressive opinions carry in our society, or at least in elite institutions like The Times, it would stand to reason that access to these prestigious newspapers, who act as progressive opinion-makers even if they do have a few token conservative writers, will make people more progressive and thus bestow on them more social privileges. Viewed from this angle, the common practice of paywalling off their publications would seem to signal a kind of desire to reinforce a class divide. Coincidentally, that is precisely what I think publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post are intended to do. If someone gets most of their news from these sources, you can conclude two things: they have the level of disposable income to spend $10 a month to read one publication, and they are likely to be highly progressive.
Many middle American conservatives will never read a single article from either publication, precisely because of the paywall. After all, why would you pay $10 a month for news and opinion coverage that, generally, doesn’t concern you or even sometimes disparages you? Now perhaps I’m just a rube and don’t fully comprehend what’s going on here, but it seems to me that these publications are bringing about precisely the darkness that democracy supposedly dies in. We are, as a country, in such an absurd situation that other outlets with advertisement-based online revenue schemes have to essentially regurgitate the main points of articles from the two national newspapers of record for anyone beyond their narrow readerships to even hear about their supposedly integral-to-democracy reporting.
The problem I have is not with these newspapers and how they have decided to make money. My problem is that they pretend to be lofty defenders of American liberty, holding power to account, when in reality they are mostly preaching to a choir of affluent, elite liberals and those who aspire to identify with them. To illustrate it another way, the Times and Post of 2020 have more in common with Field & Stream or Sports Illustrated than the national newspapers of repute that they claim to be.
That doesn’t mean I think the right-wing news world is any better, but at the very least conservative outlets admit their biases and parochial focus and wear them on their sleeves.
In closing, I simply wish that the elite newspapers of the United States would recognize the damage that they themselves are causing to the body politic in addition to that caused by the politicians they so often rightfully criticize.
Photo Credit / Washington Post Masthead, taken from Wikipedia
