The Leftist Media is Losing

News papers are a thing of the past. Many once "printed" news publications have mostly transitioned to the internet to sell their content. These news outlets are putting up paywalls in an attempt to stay afloat. Such as:

• New York Times
• Washington Post
• Huffington Post
• Bloomberg
• Financial Times
• Wired

Just to name a few.

While it seems like paywalls might bring in lots of revenue, they're not. Many of these leftist news publications are bleeding money fast. With decreased views, there are few options.

This has become a point of contention for many on the left.

Paywalls (and their tendency to depress the spread of credible sources on social media, in turn creating an information landscape tailor-made to amplify less credible sources) became a large topic of discussion during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when disinformation was moving at breakneck speeds. A year into the pandemic, Columbia Journalism Review’s “What the pandemic means for paywalls” examined the state of access to credible news:

A year [before March 2021], major publications across the United States partially or completely lowered their paywalls. The idea was that information about the outbreak of covid-19 had life-saving potential, and so it should be available to everyone, not just to subscribers—a fraction of news readers who tend to be the wealthiest and most highly-educated. Lowering paywalls was ethically sound. But it now raises important questions for media outlets: How long can they afford to keep their journalism free? And how will they determine which reporting is “essential” to the public?

[…]

That seemed to happen for The Atlantic, which received early praise for removing its paywall on coronavirus stories … as the months went by, the coronavirus proved not to have been the only subject requiring intense service-journalism: police brutality, Black Lives Matter protests, and the presidential election all carried life-or-death stakes … recently, even pandemic stories have been paywalled; a recent visit to The Atlantic showed that some articles were free, others not.

Like the 2019 tweet, CJR observed that access to news was often skewed to favor partisan outlets and sources:

Only conservative news is "partisan?"

The willingness to remove barriers may cast doubt on the common presumption that paywalls are an unfortunate necessity in journalism, an essential public good that is expensive to produce. And paywalls do not affect all readers the same way. As Current Affairs pointed out last August [2020], “The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free”; many left-leaning publications that thoroughly research and fact-check their articles paywall their journalism, while right-wing media disseminates conspiracies and racism to anyone who’ll click. Only about sixteen percent of news-readers in the United States pay for subscriptions, which means that everyone else is locked out of knowledge, and likely to encounter a disproportionate amount of far-right fodder, often strewn with misinformation.

This above highlights show exactly why their viewership has decreased. Journalism is not to "determine which reporting is “essential” to the public." That's controlling a narrative, not journalism.

Similarly, the left never names these "right wing news publications" they claim are racist. Naming which sites are "racist" would spark debate, and prove the accusation wrong.

Then there's the issue of "Fact Checking." Fact checking is a word game. It involves carefully reframing an issue, to make the narrative seem legitimate. Fact checkers NEVER tell the whole story. If they did, they would be out of business.

Fact checkers often label stories as "False" based on an arbitrary value. For example, an article might claim that Jeffrey Dahmer killed MANY people over a period of years. A fact checker would say, "False, Jeffrey Dahmer killed 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991." The initial statement is true, Dahmer did kill many people over a period of years. However the "Fact Check" is designed to keep people from reading further. They are hoping that all the reader will see is "FALSE." It's a game. And it's not about facts. Fact checkers are there to frame reality, and sway public opinion, not provide facts.

I look at this paywall issue as a great thing. It means that the leftist propaganda news outlets have fewer readers and less influence on public opinion. More people are drifting over to more conservative news sources. Most importantly, people are starting to do their own research. That is the last thing the left wants.

However; if you are a blogger, like me, or someone who needs to site left wing news outlets to get your point across -- there is a workaround. I often use left-wing publications to prove my points, because the people who need to be "convinced" of the truth are more willing to trust them. From time to time, the leftist publications are forced to publish the truth.

12ft.io is a paywall proxy.

How does it work?

The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it.

All we do is show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page.

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