Paying to Be Well-Informed

I had an interesting discussion with my daughter the other day in which she rhetorically wondered why, at a time when misinformation, disinformation, and downright truth-free craziness threaten the very foundations of our civil society, we make the best and most informative current information and analysis available only to those able and willing to pay for it.

I hadn't thought about that before, but it's true. To read everything at a major newspaper like The Washington Post or The New York Times*, you need to buy a print copy each day or subscribe to either home delivery or an online version hidden behind a paywall**. Thorough and thoughtful news and analysis magazines like The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Foreign Policy, and Mother Jones all require a subscription after a small number of articles have been read. There are a great many excellent blogs (on Substack, in particular) being written by smart people (such as Letters from an American, by historian Heather Cox Richardson***), but most require readers to pay a modest subscription price (usually around $5-10/month or more) for full access. And if you subscribe to anything in a digital format, you need to have a  connection to an ISP that allows you access to the Internet ... which costs money.

Hmmm. I suggested to my daughter that people had some alternatives that didn't require the outlay of cash, such as using free Internet access or newspaper and magazine subscriptions available at local libraries. But she reminded me that many libraries are now underfunded by local governments looking to save money on "frills," and that many people working long hours or multiple jobs find it hard to make the time to visit a library, anyhow.

She's got a point - at a time when it pays to be well-informed, most of us have to pay to be well-informed.

Perhaps this helps explain why many voters tend to support political candidates and parties whose policies actually work contrary to their interests, but whose bumper-sticker messages - bereft of context, background, and analysis - sound good. If those voters had access to in-depth information and analysis - not just the thirty-seconds-crammed-between-commercials bits they see on television or hear on the radio - they would be better informed and might make more rational decisions.

It's a problem. What do we do about it?

We have seen previous attempts by the government to provide accurate information crash on the rocks of political outrage, as happened last week when a federal judge (appointed by Der Furor, as it happens) issued an order preventing government agencies (with few exceptions) from contacting social media companies ... ostensibly because the big, bad liberal government had coerced those agencies into censoring conservative points of view concerning the appropriate response to the Covid-19 crisis†. People getting their information only from outlets like Fox, OANN, and Newsmax were thrilled, but lacked any deeper context or understanding of the issues that led to the ban ... and are likely to view future public health information that could save their lives with politically-induced skepticism.

From an economic standpoint, providing accurate information ... or anything else, for that matter ... for free in a capitalist market economy is a horror beyond all imagining for those who worship at the festooned altar of short-term profit and ever-increasing quarterly earnings. As long as there is a cost involved in the production of some good or service (like accurately-reported and contextually valid news), or the perception that a profit can be made from it, it will never be presented unless it can be monetized.

There's also no solution to the problem from a political standpoint, because there is too much political hay to be made from false information, or accurate information presented out of context, to push a political point to a credulous audience. And political parties - especially the GOP - rely for their appeal on the fact that their adherents either can't or don't want to spend the time and effort to become better informed.

And there's no solution to the problem from the standpoint of the individual citizen, because thinking is hard, and it's a lot easier to just accept what you're told and not bother with the hassle of finding ways to see whether what you're being told is accurate.

So ...

There's really no short-term solution to the problem of accurate information coming only at a cost. It's up to the individual to decide whether, or how much, to invest in being well-informed. Libraries are probably the best stopgap measure but, as my daughter has astutely observed, they don't work if people aren't able to use them.

Oh, well ... I guess we're on our own.

Have a good day. Stay well-informed, no matter how you have to do it ... it's more important today than ever.

More thoughts coming.

Bilbo

* To both of which I subscribe.

** There's a third option, which is to read the printed paper which some restaurants post above the urinals in their men's restrooms, but you still have to pay to dine there, anyhow.

*** Very readable and informative, and well-worth $5/month.

† Who knows how many lives might have been saved if we'd been allowed to drink bleach, take horse dewormers, or let UV lights shine into our bodies?