Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => Politics => Topic started by: HankB on August 22, 2022, 02:05:23 PM
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Well, after a good 25 years of subscribing, I finally cancelled my subscription to the Austin American-Statesman newspaper.
This decision was a long time coming - inertia, I guess - but their shady shenanigans finally got to be too much, and I decided I'd had enough. Some aggravations were tiny, others larger, but cumulatively they made it clear they didn't want me as a subscriber so I unsubscribed.
1. I subscribed for 7 days a week. After they got my last check, they discontinued delivery on Saturday and holidays, and "compensated" subscribers by offering additional on-line access. Nope - that's NOT what I paid for. Can you say "Swindle?"
2. Delivery used to be reliably before 6 AM. They moved printing from Austin to San Antonio so now I was lucky if I got it before 8 AM. Or at all.
3. They showed diversity of views by running editorials "From the left" and "From the right" both of which usually had people bashing Trump and those who voted for him.
4. They banished Mallard Filmore comics to the sport section as being too political, but kept Doonesbury on the comic page. Then Mallard disappeared entirely.
5. They wanted to go entirely to on-line billing, and were charging an extra $5 "paper billing fee" to send me a bill for subscription renewal.
6. They put an anti-gun editorial by a Hollywood actor AS THE HEADLINE ON THE FRONT PAGE after Uvalde. Sure they put an "OPINION" label on it - but still - at the top of the front page?
7. In stories about race, they capitalize Black but not White and make cockamamie excuses about this not being racist.
8. Letters to the editor are carefully culled to make it look as if the overwhelming majority of Texans are flaming leftists.
Could go on, but this rag is no good for anything other than wrapping garbage. My only regret is that I didn't cancel a long time ago, but I put that down to inertia.
I'll close with a saying some people attribute to Mark Twain: "If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed."
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Congratulations.
I gave up on the local bird cage liners years ago. In short order the price for the daily edition went from 25 cents to 50 cents to 75 cents and then up to a buck. At the same time, the newspaper shrank from four sections to three and then to two -- and about 80% of what was left was advertising, not news.
Their web site is a joke. The home page will feature articles that are weeks, if not months, old. They don't do any editing any more. Most of the reporters are freelance or part-time stringers who work out of their homes and submit their articles remotely. The paper just prints them as submitted -- there's basically no editorial oversight, other than perhaps trimming to fit the articles in between the ads.
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I used to pick up a copy of my small town weekly rag when I'd go to work on Thursday nights, in no small part to get a copy of the local farm store weekly sales flier.
The owner of the paper went on a 1/2 page rant against open carry and offered free "No Guns" signs to all the local businesses. Her husband is a big gun guy, probably has 3× as many guns as I do and I knew he open carried all the time. Laws for us peons buy not for her and hers.
Haven't bought a copy since.
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The Austin American-Statesman sounds suspiciously like the Idaho Statesman, which I subscribed to for like my first three weeks in Idaho before I couldn't take it anymore, then it took a couple of months to actually have the cancelation go through.
I was absolutely shocked at how lefty it was - more so than any California paper. It is owned by McClatchey. I see that the Austin American-Statesman is owned by Gannett. I suppose they just do what their big city blue state masters tell them to do. It's kinda sad that "local" newspapers are no long really local.
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My local paper used to actually be local. They had reporters who traveled in the area and wrote about local stuff. Despite their leftist slant, I would probably get it if they still did that, but now it's combined with the neighboring city's paper and all the news is just from news services and the local TV stations. Sad, but papers are well on their way to obsolescence.
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I am SO glad that I didn't stay in print journalism.
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Ha! Got a letter from them offering me a discount if I resubscribed for 3 months and signed up for automatic credit card charges . . . but if I want to be billed, it will cost me $10 more. :rofl:
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Ha! Got a letter from them offering me a discount if I resubscribed for 3 months and signed up for automatic credit card charges . . . but if I want to be billed, it will cost me $10 more. :rofl:
Got a similar offer from Verizon for home Internet. The offer purports to be able to provide home Internet for about 2/3 of what cable Internet is costing me -- but the speed would be less, and the offer requires signing up for auto-pay. I don't do auto-pay, so that's a non-starter out of the gate.