This is a primarily a media story, although I did include excerpts from a Nancy Pelosi and a James Comey OpEd
Not that many Daily Kos readers, a decidedly progressive group, are flush enough to spend the $20+ a month to subscribe to the New York Times and Washington Post where some of the best OpEds are published both by staff and high profile guest writers like, most recently, Nancy Pelosi and James Comey. If you click on either of these links to read either OpEd you will use up one of your five or ten (I‘m not sure of the latest number) of free stories per month. This includes both news stories and opinion pieces.
Unless you have lots of money to spare you’d be paywalled to poverty when it comes to following the news. This doesn’t even include the cost of subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and the other streaming services many of us rely on for much needed entertainment relief.
The Atlantic limits the number of stories you can read, Daily Beast has a premium section for many opinion pieces by the likes of Rick Wilson. Vanity Fair gives you four articles per month at no charge before being asked to subscribe. As of 2014 The New Yorker paywall allowed non-subscribers to access six free articles a month.
My latest poll showed that few Kossacks have these subscriptions this but I’ll put another one of today.
Those interested in these opinion essays are left to read excerpts of these OpEds published on Daily Kos, AlterNet, or its sister site RawStory. Furthermore, these are just opinion pieces, the Post, Times, and Journal often publish important investigative news stories. They are likely to be referenced extensively in other media including on TV and in wide circulation websites like HuffPost. It is the opinion pieces that you are being deprived of reading in full without a subscription.
It takes some work to go through a story and keeping in mind the fair use rules of offering excerpts deciding what to quote and what to describe without overstepping the fair use rule.
Not to be accused of disappointing clickbait here are my own summaries of the OpEd’s I referenced for this diary.
From James Comey:
The important thing was what happened in the audience, where there were plenty of intelligent people of deep commitment to religious principle. They laughed and smiled and clapped as a president of the United States lied, bullied, cursed and belittled the faith of other leaders. That was the deeply disturbing part of the East Room moment, and should challenge us all.
How it is possible that they didn’t get up and walk out — that they seemed to participate actively in something they should know was deeply wrong? How could they smile and laugh? Because they are people. And, like all people, they too easily surrender their individual moral authority to a group, where it can be hijacked by the loudest, harshest voice. I know because I’ve done it.
He then goes on to describe a bullying incident as a college freshman that to this day he is so ashamed of that “shudders to think” that he was a part of. He concludes with:
That’s the scary lesson of the East Room rant. There were good people in that White House on Thursday. And they went along.
We have passed through the legal and constitutional trials of the Trump era. They were painful, but we now face our greatest trial, because it is about each of us, alone. And especially about those who were, or are, Republicans. Will they assert personal, core values in the face of a powerfully human temptation to surrender them? Or will they still those inner voices, smile tightly in places like the East Room, and drift with the crowd? We will know in just nine months.
Nancy Pelosi’s OpEd “McConnell and the GOP Senate are accomplices to Trump’s wrongdoing” at least conveys her message in the title and the Brian Stauffer drawing of an elephant’s foot smashing down the scale of justice. You almost could save a free Washington Post click and not read the OpEd.
It is a short essay and the gist of it can be grasped in the first two and last two paragraphs.
For more than 200 years, our republic has endured, not only because of the wisdom of our Founders and the brilliance of our Constitution, but because of the generations of patriotic Americans who have had the courage to risk their lives to defend it.
But, tragically, the American people have watched President Trump and Republicans in Congress dismantle the Constitution that we cherish.
The People’s House will continue to defend democracy for the American people. We will uphold and protect the checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution, both in the courts of law and in the court of public opinion to preserve our republic “if we can keep it,” to quote Benjamin Franklin.
And we will always insist on this truth: that, in America, no one is above the law.
Consider where the free USA Today (website) ranks in circulation and the fact that it is even distributed at hotel room doorsteps around the country.
1 USA Today 1,621,091 Gannett Company
Lots of folks don’t know they even have an opinion section:
These are today’s primary opinion essays:
Brazile to Democrats: Rough week? Snap out of it. You have 1 job: Save America from Trump. -The Senate just gave Donald Trump and a corrupt executive branch free rein. Voters are the last bulwark against a slide into lawless authoritarianism. by Donna Brazile
Here are the also rans, with third place having less than half the circulation of USAToday.
- 2 The Wall Street Journal 1,011,200, Murdoch’s News Corp Paywall
- 3 The New York Times 483,701, The New York Times Company Paywall
- 4 New York Post 426,129, Murdochs News Corp Free
- 5 Los Angeles Times 417,936, Nant Capital Paywall
- 6 The Washington Post 254,379, Jeff Bezos owned Nash Holdings Paywall
USA Today has the largest circulation in the United States. The New York Time and The Washington Post are read by the elite, both liberal and conservative. OpEds there, and to a somewhat lesser extent The Wall Street Journal, will make it into the mainstream media news and opinion venues. The authors of liberal OpEds will often end up on MSNBC preaching to the choir. However, to reach the wider audience it seems to me that USA Today is the newspaper/website to go to.
Most members of the USA Today OPINION BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS aren’t very well known though they are are all well qualified and have diverse political views. If you watch MSNBC regularly you will recognize these four: