One key reason why assertions that are short on facts and long on divisiveness are now overwhelming mass communications is that electronic versions of responsible print periodicals have taken themselves out of competition for the public’s eyeballs, via clumsy attempts to generate revenue online.

If you're on social media, you encounter the results every day:  somebody you know shares a link to an article in a well-established and reliable media outlet, but when you click on it, you find you can’t actually read it, unless you either disable your ad blocker or buy a subscription.

Since the whole purpose of the ad blocker was to keep your reading from being disrupted by a barrage of pop-ups, where did the magazine get the idea you might be favorably disposed to letting them and their advertisers do this to you?

As for their alternative, paying them enough to read a full year's worth of their content, the fact that you don’t already have a subscription pretty clearly indicates you’re not interested in doing this.

These days, many publishers seem to think they've come up with a reasonable compromise by letting you read a few articles for free, in order to develop an appreciation for what they have to offer, and then requiring you to buy a subscription if you want to continue reading it.

If they had only thought through this proposition a bit more, they might have realized that it's the equivalent of McDonald’s giving you 3 free Big Macs to convince you that they taste good, but then demanding that you buy 365 of them in advance if you want to eat a single one more.

An approach like this is no more likely to succeed in the realm of periodicals than it would be in burger world.