Newspapers don’t make their money by selling newspapers. I sincerely hope that isn’t news to you. I hope it’s something you always knew and took for granted. Another bit of information I hope you already knew is that newspapers aren’t charitable institutions, just trying to keep you informed about what’s going on in the world.

Newspapers print whatever any particular paper calls news for only one reason: To deliver the open eyes of their readership to their advertisers. If they could round you up like sheep, and shove you into a stadium to watch advertisers extoll their products, the newspapers would do it. There you’d be, along with a bunch of other sheep, soaking up whatever advertising twaddle you were given. Just exactly like sheep used to gather in stadiums to soak up Hitler’s or Chairman Mao’s twaddle.

The process of delivering eyes and ears to magazines, TV news shows, movies with carefully placed products, tyrannical dictators, or internet social networks all work the same way. Where we get flummoxed is in thinking maybe we’re actually paying money in exchange for something of value. After all, it’s a fabulous value you get when you pay extra for the elite package that contains no advertising, isn’t it? Oh, sure! Anytime you can exchange your money for some advertising-free time, you’ve gotten one of the great modern bargains.

You see, human beings don’t place much value on things that are free. In fact, the more we have to pay for something, the more value we place on it. Which was the deal the newspapers had working for them. We figured what we were getting from newspapers was valuable because we had to pay for it.

The truth is that the newspapers could have been given away free, just like Hitler’s speeches, because the advertisers covered the newspaper’s production costs, and still provided a profit to the newspaper publisher. Our dimes, now dollars, were never necessary to financially support the newspapers. The financial support for newspapers was provided by advertisers.

It was a bargain for everyone involved. We got the satisfaction of being “informed”, the newspapers got profits, and the advertisers got the audience to which they could sell their products, thereby making their profits. It was all good.

Enter the information age.

Somebody blinked.

It was us.

The advertisers are more willing than ever to spend fortunes trying to suck money out of us for their products. Newspapers are more willing than ever to be political shills and corporate whores. But *we* got liberated from all the pandering, shilling and whoring by the cry of, “Information wants to be free!”

Well, no it doesn’t. Information doesn’t want anything. In fact, it isn’t even sentient. Information IS free. It costs nothing. It just sits around waiting for someone to discover it, you know, like gravel waits. It waits in exactly the same way it waited to be discovered in the bad old days of newspaper reporters.

If you doubt that information is actually free, I invite you to head over to Twitter, or Facebook, or a blog, or a forum, where there’s someone freely passing out information, 24/7.

And that’s your cue to protest, “But I don’t have time to gather information from many sources!” That’s the reason a lot of us carve out the time in our busy days to turn on Faux News and get “informed” in a convenient, once-a-day, easily digestible, tasty format, flavored just the way we like it. Or, if we prefer mango flavor, we tune in CNN. And we know we’re getting “good information” every month when we pay the cable or satellite bill.

If you and I had a few months to spare for consumer education, I’d explain the importance of charging the right price for a product. Charge too little and your product must not be worth much. Charge too much and it will sell, never think it won’t! It just won’t sell to the greatest number of people. And why are you selling news/information? To get advertisers’ money. So you must hit on just the right price to attract the maximum audience for your advertisers.

Where the news/information purveyor runs into problems is when the customers he needs to deliver to his advertisers realize that better news/information, and a greater quantity of news/infomation, is available in thousands of flavors, for FREE!

Worse still for him is when his customers realize that they can not only get their favorite flavor of news/information for free, but they can get it without the pandering, shilling and whoring that’s the foundation of all mainstream media (MSM) news/information outlets. Pop in a free browser plug-in and what’s left is easily ignored. Well, unless you’re the kind of person who watches TV commercials. In that case you’re probably looking at the static advertising in the side bars. But you don’t *have* to.

There is it. There’s the elephant in the MSM living room. Their customers not only know that they’re pandering to everyone but their viewers, and that they whore and shill for the elite, the governments, the evil overlords, whatever you want to call those who profit from our misery. But the customers know that nothing the MSM says is aimed at making their customer’s lives better. The MSM media is directed toward making the lives of those they pander to better by keeping you and me ill-informed enough not to wake up and see who else we’ve been trusting that’s really just shilling and whoring.

Which brings us to Rupert Murdoch’s brilliant plan to expand his pandering, shilling, whoring, newspaper empire, model to the internet, AND charge you and me for it! Rupert, remember what your granddaddy told you: “Why pay for the cow when you’re already getting the milk for free?”

Now, the truth is that our evil overlords can shut down the internet anytime they like, and we can’t stop them. That would leave us without information, for a period of time; until we get our own information infrastructure spread out far enough.

You oldies may remember hearing about something called Radio Free Europe. It’s a lovely name. Remember “pirate radio?” Another lovely name. Maybe you’ve seen old movies where “the Resistance” or “the Underground” used radios to communicate amongst themselves. It was dangerous: the Nazis were after them. But they got the job done, and their evil overlords didn’t win, did they? Okay, the Nazis didn’t win.

We still have radio. We’ll still have the internet. We’ll still have our computers and our printers. We can print pamphlets, like they did hundreds of years ago. We can do the modern version of nailing freeing and empowering information to the church house door, or the pub door, like so many others have done down through the centuries.

No, it isn’t information that wants to be free — it’s us. It’s you and me. It’s the people. It’s humanity. Now that we’ve slaked our thirst from the well of free news/information on the internet, we’re not going back.

Never again are we paying for your slanted, biased, over-priced faux news, MSM!