Surprisingly, this has nothing to do with politics . . . although I could certainly go off on that subject as well. But not today.

Rather, this is about information . Like the good citizens of Russia, I have recently found myself with access to fewer and fewer reliable news sources. Oh, they’re out there, all right; I just can’t get to them.

Several years ago, I moved from the Washington, D.C. area, where everything was at my fingertips, to the quiet countryside in the southeastern U.S. It’s peaceful and relaxing here; but it’s also a bit of a schlep to many of the conveniences I had always taken for granted. There’s always a trade-off in life.

And our area does not receive cable TV. There is satellite service, but quite frankly, it sucks: a few drops of rain, or a good breeze, and it’s “bye-bye, TV reception.“ So I gave that up, and went with something called Fire TV, which gives me lots of movies and old sitcoms, plus a couple of network news stations that honestly don’t offer the most in-depth coverage.

Fortunately, there is the internet. And on the internet, there are news services from every corner of the world: CNN, BBC, RFE/RL, Al Jazeera, MSNBC, the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Kyiv Independent . . . even the Moscow Times and TASS from Russia. And more.

I don’t have time to read all of them, so I’ve relied on a chosen few that I found to be the most dependable and least biased, which worked well . . . until, one by one, they began requiring paid subscriptions for online access to their full stories. And there’s the rub.

Now, I get it; I do. The print publications — the Times, the Journal, the Post, et al. — are businesses whose subscriptions have no doubt decreased as more and more people have come to rely on the internet. But why are the TV broadcasters, whose programming is included under their customers’ cable or satellite contracts, also starting to charge for internet access — which logically should be covered by our internet service fees?

I am a news junkie. I am also an older, retired woman with a limited income; I can’t justify the cost of a half dozen subscriptions in addition to what I already pay for internet service (not to mention that Fire TV).

We are living in a time when it is increasingly important to be well-informed by reliable, impartial news sources, so as not to be taken in by all of the misinformation, disinformation, and AI garbage coming at us from every direction. If the legitimate, mainstream media were to become inaccessible, we would be truly lost.

Does anyone out there have a solution?

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
2/6/26