to the average working class net user and voter, it just might. As I'm sure you read
paywalls are part of the reason Americans’ trust in media is at an all-time low. Less than a third of Americans in a recent Gallup poll say they have “a fair amount” or a “a great deal” of trust that the news is fair and accurate. A large percentage of these Americans see media as being biased. Well, part of the reason they think media are biased is that most fair, accurate, and unbiased news sits behind a wall. The free stuff needn’t be fair or accurate or unbiased. Disinformationists, conspiracy theorists, and Russian and Chinese troll farms don’t employ fact-checkers and libel lawyers and copy editors.
What OP part did you not understand about subscriptions increasing with dropped paywalls by
The Seattle Times...The Philadelphia Inquirer ...The Tampa Bay Times, The Denver Post, and The St. Paul Pioneer Press, in Minnesota, all experienced similar increases, as did papers operated by the Tribune Publishing Company, including the Chicago Tribune and the Hartford Courant...
??
In the interests of media profit there are all kinds of 'soft' limited access deals before paywall deals, sure. But you'd have to foresee that over an election year, those wouldn't last.
Have you seen the profit margins of corporate media? Do you seriously think these media would have to shut down without paywall? Or are you arguing for the sake of argument?
I'd have to ask, in a presidential election year unlike any other -- what's an electorate needing information supposed to do? If you think that at this point in election history, corporate media profit justifies an underinformed electorate, okay then.
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