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."
