Stop Unsubscribing

Attempting to defund the press is an attack on democracy

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

To my fellow progressives: stop unsubscribing from essential news sources any time they do something you don’t agree with!

Do you leave your partner when they say something that offends you?

Do you move to a different house if your neighbor puts up a campaign sign for a candidate you don’t support?

Hell, have you sold your Tesla?

And also, let’s play this scenario out: we all get mad that The Washington Post doesn’t endorse a (our) candidate so we self-righteously defund them. Let’s say we succeed and the Post goes out of business. Aside from showing the world how ideologically pure we are and putting hard working journalists out of their jobs, what have we accomplished?

Oh, right; we’ve killed one of the few remaining reliable national sources of news and information. And, who’s going to replace that? A handful of bloggers? A Facebook group? A town crier?

No. No one. The answer is no one. No one is going to replace journalistic institutions that are absolutely essential to a functioning democracy. No one else can maintain foreign bureaus to report on wars overseas. No one else can gain access to politicians and make them answer tough questions. No one else can act as the last blessed barrier between some semblance of shared reality and the storm of falsehoods and chaos brewing on the other side of that wall.

We’ll be left with Fox News and a slew of newsletters by out-of-work former journalists trying to support themselves on subscriptions so they can replicate some bargain-basement semblance of the important work they were trained to do.

So, listen — when an essential mainstream media entity does something that you don’t like or publishes an opinion you don’t agree with, write a letter to the editor. Submit an op-ed. Take to your newsletter or Facebook page or a street corner with picket signs — whatever — make your voice heard like a responsible citizen.

Just stop unsubscribing. Your virtue signaling is simultaneously dismantling the only remaining safeguards we have against the outright lies and confusion threatening to lead us down the dark road toward fascism.

Remember how horrified we all were on January 6, 2021, when a sacred institution central to our system of governance was attacked? Well, guess what: a free and robust press is just as sacred, just as central to our democracy.

Stop trying to tear it down.