Gongol.com Archives: March 2025
March 16, 2025
The news paywall is one of the most ubiquitous irritants on the Internet. Nobody likes them, and no matter how reasonable the argument that ad-supported news is an unsustainable model, the plain fact is that most consumers have a finite budget for news and entertainment media, and that budget is far less than the prospective cost of paying for access to every service that might enlighten, entertain, and inform them. ■ This grows even truer for people who live in countries where the economy is still developing, or where the authorities are keen to restrict access to foreign voices. If $25 a month for a New York Times subscription seems like a lot to an American, it's proportionally twice as expensive to someone living in Greece, where the per-capita GDP is half that of the US, or three times as costly in a place like the Dominican Republic. ■ In North Korea, where Internet access to the outside world is basically forbidden to everyone? Such a subscription is literally beyond all price. ■ Yet into this world, the same governments that seek to repress news-seeking inside their own borders are happy to pay for RT, CCTV, and Press TV, among many other names. They know that the appetite for information is great, and that people who can't or won't pay for high-quality content may be satisfied with outlets that look news-adjacent. ■ There is no withdrawal from the competitive environment for influence in the modern media economy, only surrender. What the United States has furnished for decades through the US Agency for Global Media and its predecessors has been a diet of overwhelmingly balanced and straight coverage of the world via the Voice of America, RFE/RL, and other outlets. The prevailing wisdom has been that reality is the best friend of liberty: Telling the truth about events (warts and all) will reflect better on the free world than on oppressive regimes. ■ It was a good investment when the VOA went to air in 1942 as a counter-program to propaganda from Germany, and it's a good investment today. Ben Franklin once put it that "The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse." He may have been talking about pedestrian affairs like committee meetings, but it's no less true in the global media environment. Going dark is a sure way to let the propagandists of hostile nations flood the zone with lies about America's purported faults. Liberty only needs to tell the truth to prevail, but it can persuade no one if it remains silent.
