Independent thought challenges the echo chamber

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/10/2023 (733 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When I was in third grade, our teacher told us she liked to hear accounts of her students reading at home. She particularly liked hearing from parents who reported their child reading the newspaper in the morning.

This was met with giggles from the assembled eight-year-olds, as some imagined one another reclined in an easy chair, perhaps puffing on a pipe, obscured behind a copy of the Free Press like tiny grandpas.

I suppose I was an outlier, because I did read the paper in third grade, and that day I was surprised at those who didn’t. I mean, after the back of the cereal box or the side of the blue Lucerne milk carton, the Free Press was the only other literature on the kitchen table.

At that time, and in times prior, the newspaper was ubiquitous. We had coin-operated boxes on most corners, sellers on downtown street corners with wagons of papers, and of course daily delivery. The Free Press was the default vehicle for getting the information we needed to be informed about ourselves and our world.

But times have changed, and we now have a multitude of reading options. Not even the cereal box is getting its due any more. We have smartphones, tablets and laptops that give us endless cat videos and fashion tips and reels of other people playing video games, if that’s our thing. They’ll also provide us with free journalism, but not from the Free Press.

The convenience and passivity of how we now get news delivered has driven a wedge between readers and independent, unbiased information. This distance is further increased by Facebook’s blocking of Canadian news and the threat of Google doing the same.

The convenience and passivity of how we now get news delivered has driven a wedge between readers and independent, unbiased information.

Many of us pay to subscribe to Netflix, Disney+, Prime, Crave… the list goes on. These each don’t differ much from the cost of a Free Press digital subscription, yet we consider them essential while decrying the cost of independent journalism.

We voluntarily and involuntarily have narrowed the scope and quality of information that actually reaches us, and we are poorer for it, despite it being free to consume.

In our costless content-saturated lives, the idea of exchanging a few dollars for unbiased, independent information entirely put forth by the same people we take the bus with feels unreasonable.

“I’d read the Free Press, but it’s paywalled,” is something I hear often. I’ve never heard this in reference to Netflix.

“I’d read the Free Press, but it’s paywalled,” is something I hear often. I’ve never heard this in reference to Netflix.

The nature of newspaper subscription has changed, and requires a change in habit and commitment as well. A subscription to a local paper is no longer a default choice for information — it’s something far more important and active.

Subscribing is now an act of resistance to the algorithms that define us. It’s the willingness to enter bravely into conversation with the wider community, an invitation to have a voice in what defines us, what we regard as important and what we disagree on. It’s a statement of our collective uniqueness and a pre-emptive strike against intolerance.

A subscription holds the line against disinformation and raises the voices of our friends and neighbours. Just the act of readership is a brave statement of willingness to encounter differing opinions and reports, and to consider them with rare coolheadedness. It is emancipation from the echo chamber.

By sustaining a daily independent paper, Winnipeg declares our lives and stories worthy of broader conversation and validates the importance of this city and the people who live here.

By sustaining a daily independent paper, Winnipeg declares our lives and stories worthy of broader conversation and validates the importance of this city and the people who live here.

For me, reading the Free Press these last few weeks leading up to the election has been impressive and humbling. I do not work in the newsroom, and I stand in awe of the incredible work done there.

We could not possibly hope to have this level of diverse and detailed conversation about candidates and issues without this newspaper — not only the factual reporting and dogged pursuit of truth, but the scope of understanding what we, unique to this place and time, want and need to know.

When I open the paper in the morning, as I have since I was old enough to read it, I know the stories within are those that matter to all of us. The words pouring forth from the newsroom are quite literally the stories by and about our friends and neighbours.

They are the conversations around us, completely devoid of algorithm or browsing history. They are the human voice of all of us.

This Free Press is the way we turn moments into legacy as we pass through this place and this time.

In the deluge of disinformation and alternative facts, subscribing to a local, independent, uniquely Winnipeg conversation becomes an act of reclamation, resistance and even nationhood.

A subscription is a refusal to yield. It is a declaration: This is where I am from. This is what matters to me.

rebecca.chambers@freepress.mb.ca