Contrast it with Netflix's model of unsubscription, which you can do at any time with a single click. They've even gone as far as automatically cancelling inactive accounts. Netflix is obviously a company with confidence in their own product, so they don't resort to any dark patterns in their unsubscription process like the NYTs does.
There's a fundamental disconnect between the mission of a news organization and getting paid to lie (which is, fundamentally, what advertising is). You cannot accept ad dollars and be an effective purveyor of truth.
Not fundamentally. A lot of advertising may be well be outright lying, or close enough as makes no difference.
But... I used to go by a shop named "Cards Galore", it had its name in reasonably sized letters hanging over the sidewalk, and then when I wanted to buy a card I knew where I could get one. Nothing lying about that. I think there's a lot of advertising which is like that.
Something weaker might be true, like "large-scale advertising will inevitably lead to large-scale lying". But "advertising is fundamentally lying" is not true.
Companies toying with my psychology in order to get me to buy something from them... well, that doesn't sit well with me.
Internet advertising is pretty much all lying. Even when what an ad says is factual, they're not telling you the whole truth, they're telling you a partial truth that leaves out pieces of information which they know would be relevant to you--that's a lie because their intent is to deceive you.
And by the way, I do get it: in a lot of businesses you have to advertise because your competitors are advertising. Advertising is a blight on society that infects everyone: opting out of advertising isn't a viable option without major sacrifice. I'd like to see a future where we all agree to stop advertising and rely on consumer-reports-style reviewers to obtain unbiased product information.
And even when they make statements of fact, it's still lying because they leave things out with the intent to deceive.
That's the crux, though. It technically doesn't have to be like this, but it almost always is - so "advertising is a bunch of consumer-hostile lies" is a more accurate generalization than "advertising informs people".
not to defend the NYTimes here, they're definitely in the wrong. but doxxing a source for an article and doxxing the subject of an article are very different things. The subject of this article is not a "source".
Not saying this is a good thing, but I think assuming that this "policy" is there to get advertising dollars is weird. Why would advertisers care?
To me, these are two separate problems: 1) NYT doxxes sources, 2) NYT serves advertisers rather than readers. There might be some relation between these two problems but I don't personally have enough information to conclude that.
I didn't make that clear in my previous post, my apologies. No implication was intended.