Moments after receiving my lunch order, the robots whirred to life. A clawlike contraption lurched forward, like a bird pecking at feed, to snatch dishes holding a faux-chicken cutlet and potatoes, then inserted them onto a metal track that snakes through a 650-degree-Fahrenheit oven. Seven minutes, some automatic food dispensers, and two conveyor belts later (with a healthy assist from human hands), my meal was sitting on a shelf of mint-green cubbies. It was a vegan fried-chicken sandwich, a cucumber salad, crispy potatoes, and a smattering of other sides.

This is Kernel, a fast-casual venture that opened its first store in Manhattan this February. Its founder, Steve Ells, kicked off the lunch-bowl boom when he started Chipotle in 1993. Now, he told me during my visit, he is betting that machines will trigger a “reinvention of how a fast-food or fast-casual restaurant can run.” Robots, he prophesied, will bring faster and more accurate service at lower overhead costs. Plenty of chains have tested out semi-automated cooking, with mixed success—including deep-frying robots at Jack in the Box and robotic bowl assembly at Sweetgreen and Chipotle. But Kernel has been built from the ground up for robots. Just three employees are needed in the restaurant at any time, compared with the dozen needed at a typical fast-casual restaurant. Soon many more people may be eating robot-prepared vegan chicken: Ells has raised $36 million and hopes to expand quickly, starting with several more locations throughout New York City this year.

But robots may represent less of a fast-food revolution than the obvious next step in its evolution. For more than a century, technology has made fast food more efficient—and, in particular, more automated. That’s what turned McDonald’s into a giant 60 years ago. Such restaurants can be considered “sort of mini-factories,” Dave Henkes, a food-industry analyst at Technomic, told me, and have always used “automation to drive speed and convenience.” And, like the simpler cooking technology before them, today’s robots are speeding up humans’ work without fully replacing them. For now, Kernel is no different.

Kernel’s entirely vegan menu is limited (Ells prefers “focused”), but everything looked and tasted like it came from fine dining. That is no coincidence: Kernel’s chief culinary officer, Andrew Black, was a sous-chef at Eleven Madison Park, a three-Michelin-star restaurant with a $365 tasting menu, located a block away from Kernel. While I ate, he and Ells gave passionate spiels about each item: The marinated beets, a surprise best seller, are topped with quinoa, green hummus, and a seed crunch to make the dish nutritionally complete. For the crispy potatoes, Black specially selected a spud variety for its sugar, starch, and water content, and they’re then cooked three times—steamed, fried, baked—to achieve a shattering crunch and pillowy interior. Black and his staff dredge and fry every piece of “chicken” by hand; as I bit into my sandwich, Ells mused that they should try swapping imitation meat for a block of tofu.

Simply put, Kernel is a group of excellent chefs equipped with the world’s most high-tech toaster oven. All the food is cooked by chefs at a central kitchen about 10 minutes away, delivered hourly by a bicycle courier, and heated by a robot. That off-site preparation, Ells told me, provides at least 80 percent of the menu’s quality. The food then has to be assembled by still three other people. Human one, the “replenisher,” loads the hourly delivery of prepared food onto a shelf that the robotic arm can reach. The “assembler” puts together every sandwich and side, and a third person, the “bundler,” bags each order and places it in a cubby.

Courtesy of Kernel

The setup is “extraordinarily fast, accurate, and predictable,” Ells told me, nothing less than a “paradigm shift.” Employees barely have to move their feet. But a robot that heats and moves around your food is just the next iteration in the pursuit of speed and standardization. The restaurant with the strongest claim to inventing fast food may be White Castle, which, in 1921, “did something that was unusual for the time—they tried to standardize their operations from restaurant to restaurant,” David Hogan, a fast-food historian at Heidelberg University, in Ohio, and the author of Selling ’em by the Sack: White Castle and the Creation of American Food, told me. Cooking procedures were precise and uniform; cooking implements were manufactured in a single location; even the physical buildings came out of a central factory.

The playbook hasn’t substantively changed since. Before buying McDonald’s and launching its global success, Ray Kroc sold the chain automatic milkshake mixers. What first captivated him about the restaurant, he wrote in his 1977 memoir, was how “each step in producing the limited menu was stripped down to its essence and accomplished with a minimum of effort.” That year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published a study noting that fast-food chains had “introduced principles of industrial engineering” to restaurants. In particular, “the off-premise preparation of foods” and improved “cooking devices,” such as microwaves and convection ovens, reduced preparation time and added uniformity. Restaurants today use specialized equipment, extensive training manuals, and various trackers to ensure speed and consistency. Sweetgreen has an app that instructs employees exactly how to heat and prepare food, and McDonald’s cooks beef patties for precisely 42 seconds. If anything, Kernel’s off-site kitchen is conceptually closer to the centrally prepared, frozen patties and fries served by fast-food burger joints of old than the chicken grilled on-site at a Chipotle.

To the extent that Kernel is a reinvention, Ells hasn’t invented a new paradigm so much as found another. Sweetgreen already acts like a tech company, and Domino’s has touted itself as one. Now Ells talks about his robot-assisted process as an “operating system.” What may one day distinguish Kernel’s automation is that the space is designed for robots from inception. So far, other chains have retrofitted human kitchens with robots, which creates confusion and disaster, Stanislav Ivanov, who studies robotics and restaurants at Bulgaria’s Varna University of Management, told me. Robots malfunction and, even when they don’t, bulky machines interfere with equipment, stations, and a floor plan designed for human movement. In 2018, an early burger-flipping robot that was tested at a CaliBurger in Pasadena was temporarily decommissioned because it couldn’t be incorporated into the human workflow.

Kernel is, at least in theory, built for “the technology that we know is coming,” Ells said. The equipment is all mobile and can be swapped or calibrated for newer gadgets (permanent counters, ovens, and stovetops, for instance, are unnecessary because robots don’t care if work stations are waist-height). Drones could bring prepared food from the central kitchen to restaurants, and robots might assemble burgers in their entirety. Efficient robots and a vegan menu, he said, will continue to reduce the restaurant’s carbon footprint. Gesturing to the “bundler” who bagged all the food, Ells said, “Instead of Carlos, imagine a robot arm” (Carlos kept bundling without so much as a flinch).

With automation, of course, comes the risk of disappearing jobs. Kernel and other restaurants are experimenting with robots not only in pursuit of efficiency, but because the industry is facing a chronic labor shortage. The low pay doesn’t help, and the jobs are also exhausting as well as, at times, hazardous. Deep-frying, for instance, is extremely dangerous, which is why one of the most popular cooking robots in the industry simply runs the fry station. Fast-food chains pursuing automation are trying to reduce head count, especially as some states raise their minimum wages. But for now, Henkes said, robots have typically led restaurants to redeploy people to different positions. Ells claimed that Kernel’s existing employees, who are currently paid $25 an hour, will eventually be moved to more front-of-house jobs, helping guests and monitoring the robots.

But a burger prepared, cooked, and served without a human touch is still more accurately described as speculation. Faster and more automated cooking technology may well be imminent, but humans will still be involved for years to come. Automated pizzaiolos, line cooks, and salad tossers have failed; successful robots typically target a specific task, like plunging fries into boiling oil.

Just as the quality of Kernel’s food depends on human chefs, the quality of its automation will depend less on technology than on human vision and feedback. Each day, employees meet to discuss what worked and what didn’t, which will help iterate the technology: Dozens of bugs, including stalled production and locked cubbies, have been smoothed out. On the first day, the cubbies didn’t open; last month, a stray potato shut down Kernel’s production line. Kernel is building new tools, but relying on the same human logic that made White Castle, McDonald’s, and Chipotle successful. I came to the restaurant to witness fancy robots, but I would return simply for the faux-chicken sandwich and the cucumbers topped with cashews and chili jam. Kernel the restaurant is far more impressive than Kernel the tech company.

“The entire world knows exactly why the U.S. is trying to ban TikTok,” James Li declared on March 16 to his nearly 100,000 followers on the social-media platform. His video then cut to a subtitled clip of a Taiwanese speaker purportedly discussing how “TikTok inadvertently offended the Jewish people” by hosting pro-Palestinian content. “The power of the Jewish people in America is definitely more scary than Trump,” the speaker goes on. “They have created the options: either ban or sell to the Americans. In reality, it’s neither—it’s selling to a Jewish investment group.”

Li, who calls himself an “indie journalist” and subsequently posted another video blaming Israel for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, got more than 160,000 views for his TikTok theory—and the video was one of the poorer-performing entries making similar claims on the platform.

What prompted this outburst? On March 13, Congress advanced a bill that would give TikTok’s Chinese parent company six months to sell it or be banned from American app stores. The legislation passed 352–65, with overwhelming bipartisan support, and the rational observer will have no trouble understanding why.

The United States has a long history of preventing foreign adversaries from controlling important communications infrastructure. Washington spent more than a decade, under Democratic and Republican presidents, leading a successful international campaign to block the Chinese telecom giant Huawei from Western markets. Donald Trump attempted to force a TikTok sale back in 2020. The reasons are straightforward: The app has access to the data of some 150 million American users—nearly half the population—but it is owned and controlled by the Chinese company ByteDance. Like all companies in the country, ByteDance is effectively under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party, which regularly punishes and even disappears business leaders who displease it. A former ByteDance executive has said that the CCP had “supreme access” to the company’s data, and used the info to track protesters in Hong Kong, for example.

[Read: Beijing is ruining TikTok]

Recent polls show robust public support for TikTok’s ban or sale, and for years, Gallup has found that Americans see China as the country’s greatest enemy. In short, Congress has strong electoral and political incentives to act against TikTok. But spend some time on the platform itself, and you’ll discover a very different culprit behind all this: Jews.

“We were all thinking it: Israel is trying to buy TikTok,” the influencer Ian Carroll told his 1.5 million followers last month. The evidence: Steven Mnuchin, the former Trump Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs executive, has sought investors to purchase the app. “He’s not Israel, right?” continued Carroll. “Well, let’s peel this onion back one layer at a time, starting with just the fact that he’s Jewish.”

Carroll’s TikTok bio says “do your own research,” and he certainly had research to share. “The censorship is not about China on TikTok,” he explained. Rather, “as a TikTok creator who gets censored all the frickin’ time, I can tell you that the things you get censored about are the CIA and Israel.” Carroll did not address why Israel would go through so much trouble to acquire TikTok if it already controlled the platform, or why the Semitic censors somehow missed his video and its more than 1 million views, not to mention the several similarly viral follow-ups he posted.

In truth, far from suppressing such content, TikTok’s algorithm happily promotes it. I purposely viewed the videos for this piece while logged out of the platform, and it nonetheless began suggesting to me more material along these lines through its sidebar recommendations.

Characteristic of anti-Semitic online discourse, these videos and others like them interchangeably reference individual American Jews, American Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, American pro-Israel lobbying groups like AIPAC, and the state of Israel, as though they are all part of one single-minded international conspiracy to take down TikTok. When a commenter asked Carroll to “look into universal studios pulling their music from TikTok,” a reference to the Universal Music conglomerate’s dispute with TikTok over royalties, Carroll replied, “Universal CEO is a Jewish man.”

“A foreign government is influencing the 2024 election,” the leftist podcaster and former Bernie Sanders Press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray declared on X in March. “I’m not talking about China, but Israel. In a leaked recording, ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt admitted that Israel had a ‘TikTok problem.’ Suddenly, a divided Congress agrees on one thing: A social media ban.” Greenblatt is an American Jew, the ADL is an American organization, the bill isn’t a ban, and the push for a forced sale predated the Gaza war, but other than that, Gray was on the money.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why Facebook and Twitter won’t ban antisemitism]

“Banning TikTok became a crucial emergency because what they saw was a bunch of young individuals, essentially people that are going to be the future leaders of America, who were not pro-Israel,” the far-right commentator Candace Owens claimed in March on her popular show at The Daily Wire. She then issued an implied threat: “If TikTok is in fact banned, there is no question that Israel will be blamed, AIPAC will be blamed, the ADL will be blamed, Jews are going to be blamed … You can see that sentiment building.” (Owens left The Daily Wire a week later following a string of anti-Semitic incidents, which included claims that Jews were doing “horrific things” and “controlling people with blackmail,” as well as her favoriting a social-media post that accused a rabbi of being “drunk on Christian blood.”)

At this point, it’s not uncommon to find videos about the TikTok legislation that do not even mention Jews or Israel—like this one with 1.5 million views—yet are flooded with hundreds of comments, garnering tens of thousands of likes, accusing “Zionists,” “Jews,” or AIPAC of being behind it, despite years of national-security reporting on concerns over the platform’s Chinese owners. That alleged Jewish malefactors are being assailed on TikTok even when they are not invoked explicitly in a video illustrates how widely the meme has spread.

Like many conspiracy theories, the notion that Jews are out to ban TikTok contains a grain of truth. Jewish and pro-Israel groups have raised concerns about TikTok’s failure to moderate anti-Semitic content for years, including when it pertains to Israel, but they have never called for the app to be shut down. After the TikTok sale legislation was proposed, the Jewish Federations of North America said it “appropriately balances free speech and individual rights with regulatory action” while asserting that “our community understands that social media is a major driver of the rise in antisemitism, and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.” (Presumably, the organization arrived at this conclusion by spending 10 minutes on the app.) Researchers have found that pro-Palestinian content dwarfs pro-Israel content on TikTok, likely reflecting the platform’s young and international demographic.

But no conspiracy theories or appeals to recent geopolitical developments are necessary to understand why U.S. politicians wouldn’t want one of the most-trafficked social-media networks in America to be run by Communist China via a black-box algorithm. Just this past December, researchers at Rutgers found that anti-China posts on topics like the Hong Kong protests or the regime’s brutal repression of Uyghur Muslims were dramatically underrepresented on TikTok compared with Instagram.

TikTok’s response to allegations that it could function as a foreign influence operation have not exactly allayed concerns. Shortly after the Rutgers study was published, the app restricted access to the tool used by academics to track its content. Last month, it sent multiple alerts to its American users falsely warning that Congress was about to ban TikTok and urging them to contact their representatives. In fact, the bill seeks to force a sale to new ownership, much as congressional scrutiny over data privacy led the dating app Grindr to be sold to non-Chinese owners in 2020.

Simply put, none of what is happening to the social-media platform is new. Neither is the tendency to blame Jews for the world’s problems—but that doesn’t make the impulse any less dangerous. Many understand anti-Semitism as a personal prejudice that singles out Jewish people for their difference, much like other minorities experience racism. But anti-Semitism also manifests as a conspiracy theory about how the world works, alleging that sinister string-pulling Jews are the source of social, political, and economic problems—and this is the sort of anti-Semitism that tends to get people killed.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why so many people still don’t understand anti-semitism]

Consider recent American history: In 2018, a far-right gunman who blamed Jews for mass immigration murdered 11 people in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. In 2019, assailants tied to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement attacked a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, killing three; one of the shooters had written on social media about Jews controlling the government. In 2022, an Islamic extremist took an entire congregation hostage in Colleyville, Texas, and demanded that a rabbi get a convict released from a nearby prison. These perpetrators—white supremacist, Black extremist, radical Islamist—had essentially nothing in common other than their belief that a Jewish cabal governed world affairs and was the cause of their problems.

The reality is the reverse: Jews constitute just 2 percent of the American population, and although they exercise influence like any other minority, they frequently disagree among themselves and do not dictate the destiny of the majority. Politicians voting against TikTok are pursuing their conception of the national interest, not being suborned to serve some nebulous Jewish interest. Remove the Jews from the equation, and the situation will be the same.

Conspiracy theorists typically claim to be combatting concealed power structures. But as in this case, their delusions make them unable to perceive the way power actually works. Thus, conspiratorial anti-Semitism hobbles its adherents, preventing them from rationally organizing to advance their own causes by distracting them with fantastical Jewish plots.

“Anti-Semitism isn’t just bigotry toward the Jewish community,” the Black civil-rights activist Eric Ward once told me. “It is actually utilizing bigotry toward the Jewish community in order to deconstruct democratic practices, and it does so by framing democracy as a conspiracy rather than a tool of empowerment or a functional tool of governance.”

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories won’t safeguard TikTok from the bill that’s currently moving through the U.S. legislature. But the more people buy into them, the more they will imperil not only American Jews but American democracy as well.

How many times has it happened? You’re on your computer, searching for a particular article, a hard-to-find fact, or a story you vaguely remember, and just when you seem to have discovered the exact right thing, a paywall descends. “$1 for Six Months.” “Save 40% on Year 1.” “Here’s Your Premium Digital Offer.” “Already a subscriber?” Hmm, no.

Now you’re faced with that old dilemma: to pay or not to pay. (Yes, you may face this very dilemma reading this story in The Atlantic.) And it’s not even that simple. It’s a monthly or yearly subscription—“Cancel at any time.” Is this article or story or fact important enough for you to pay?

Or do you tell yourself—as the overwhelming number of people do—that you’ll just keep searching and see if you can find it somewhere else for free?

According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, more than 75 percent of America’s leading newspapers, magazines, and journals are behind online paywalls. And how do American news consumers react to that? Almost 80 percent of Americans steer around those paywalls and seek out a free option.

Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism. And they get in the way of the public being informed, which is the foundation  of democracy. It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people, during an election in which democracy is on the line. There’s a simple, temporary solution: Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness—it dies behind paywalls.

The problem is not just that professionally produced news is behind a wall; the problem is that paywalls increase the proportion of free and easily available stories that are actually filled with misinformation and disinformation. Way back in 1995 (think America Online), the UCLA professor Eugene Volokh predicted that the rise of “cheap speech”—free internet content—would not only democratize mass media by allowing new voices, but also increase the proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories, which would then destabilize mass media.

Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and one of the premier scholars on mis- and disinformation, told me he knows of no research on the relationship between paywalls and misinformation. “But it stands to reason,” he said, “that if people seeking news are blocked by the paywalls that are increasingly common on serious professional journalism websites, many of those people are going to turn to less reliable sites where they’re more likely to encounter mis- and disinformation.”

In the pre-internet days, information wasn’t free—it just felt that way. Newsstands were everywhere, and you could buy a paper for a quarter. But that paper wasn’t just for you: After you read it at the coffee shop or on the train, you left it there for the next guy. The same was true for magazines. When I was the editor of Time, the publisher estimated that the “pass-along rate” of every issue was 10 to 15—that is, each magazine we sent out was read not only by the subscriber, but by 10 to 15 other people. In 1992, daily newspapers claimed a combined circulation of some 60 million; by 2022, while the nation had grown, that figure had fallen to 21 million. People want information to be free—and instantly available on their phone.

Barrett is aware that news organizations need revenue, and that almost a third of all U.S. newspapers have stopped publishing over the previous two decades. “It’s understandable that traditional news-gathering businesses are desperate for subscription revenue,” he told me, “but they may be inadvertently boosting the fortunes of fake news operations motivated by an appetite for clicks or an ideological agenda—or a combination of the two.”

Digital-news consumers can be divided into three categories: a small, elite group that pays hundreds to thousands of dollars a year for high-end subscriptions; a slightly larger group of people with one to three news subscriptions; and the roughly 80 percent of Americans who will not or cannot pay for information. Some significant percentage of this latter category are what scholars call “passive” news consumers—people who do not seek out information, but wait for it to come to them, whether from their social feeds, from friends, or from a TV in an airport. Putting reliable information behind paywalls increases the likelihood that passive news consumers will receive bad information.

In the short history of social media, the paywall was an early hurdle to getting good information; now there are newer and more perilous problems. The Wall Street Journal instituted a “hard paywall” in 1996. The Financial Times formally launched one in 2002. Other publications experimented with them, including The New York Times, which established its subscription plan and paywall in 2011. In 2000, I was the editor of Time.com, Time magazine’s website, when these experiments were going on. The axiom then was that “must have” publications like The Wall Street Journal could get away with charging for content, while “nice to have” publications like Time could not. Journalists were told that “information wants to be free.” But the truth was simpler: People wanted free information, and we gave it to them. And they got used to it.

Of course, publications need to cover their costs, and journalists need to be paid. Traditionally, publications had three lines of revenue: subscriptions, advertising, and newsstand sales. Newsstand sales have mostly disappeared. The internet should have been a virtual newsstand, but buying individual issues or articles is almost impossible. The failure to institute a frictionless mechanism for micropayments to purchase news was one of the greatest missteps in the early days of the web. Some publications would still be smart to try it.  

I’d argue that paywalls are part of the reason Americans’ trust in media is at an all-time low. Less than a third of Americans in a recent Gallup poll say they have “a fair amount” or a “a great deal” of trust that the news is fair and accurate. A large percentage of these Americans see media as being biased. Well, part of the reason they think media are biased is that most fair, accurate, and unbiased news sits behind a wall. The free stuff needn’t be fair or accurate or unbiased. Disinformationists, conspiracy theorists, and Russian and Chinese troll farms don’t employ fact-checkers and libel lawyers and copy editors.

Part of the problem with the current, free news environment is that the platform companies, which are the largest distributors of free news, have deprioritized news. Meta has long had an uncomfortable relationship with news on Facebook. In the past year, according to CNN, Meta has changed its algorithm in a way that has cost some news outlets 30 to 40 percent of their traffic (and others more). Threads, Meta’s answer to X, is “not going to do anything to encourage” news and politics on the platform, says Adam Mosseri, the executive who oversees it. “My take is, from a platforms’ perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue [news] might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.” The platform companies are not in the news business; they are in the engagement business. News is less engaging than, say, dance shorts or chocolate-chip-cookie recipes—or eye-catching conspiracy theories.

As the platforms have diminished news, they have also weakened their integrity and content-moderation teams, which enforce community standards or terms of service. No major platform permits false advertising, child pornography, hate speech, or speech that leads to violence; the integrity and moderation teams take down such content. A recent paper from Barrett’s team at the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights argues that the greatest tech-related threat in 2024 is not artificial intelligence or foreign election interference, but something more mundane: the retreat from content moderation and the hollowing-out of trust-and-safety units and election-integrity teams. The increase in bad information on the free web puts an even greater burden on fact-based news reporting.

Now AI-created clickbait is also a growing threat. Generative AI’s ability to model, scrape, and even plagiarize real news—and then tailor it to users—is extraordinary. AI clickbait mills, posing as legitimate journalistic organizations, are churning out content that rips off real news and reporting. These plagiarism mills are receiving funding because, well, they’re cheap and profitable. For now, Google’s rankings don’t appear to make a distinction between a news article written by a human being and one written by an AI chatbot. They can, and they should.  

The best way to address these challenges is for newsrooms to remove or suspend their paywalls for stories related to the 2024 election. I am mindful of the irony of putting this plea behind The Atlantic’s own paywall, but that’s exactly where the argument should be made. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably paid to support journalism that you think matters in the world. Don’t you want it to be available to others, too, especially those who would not otherwise get to see it?

Emergencies and natural disasters have long prompted papers to suspend their paywalls. When Hurricane Irene hit the New York metropolitan area in 2011, The New York Times made all storm-related coverage freely available. “We are aware of our obligations to our audience and to the public at large when there is a big story that directly impacts such a large portion of people,” a New York Times editor said at the time. In some ways, this creates a philosophical inconsistency. The paywall says, This content is valuable and you have to pay for it. Suspending the paywall in a crisis says, This content is so valuable that you don’t have to pay for it. Similarly, when the coronavirus hit, The Atlantic made its COVID coverage—and its COVID Tracking Project—freely available to all.

During the pandemic, some publications found that suspending their paywall had an effect they had not anticipated: It increased subscriptions. The Seattle Times, the paper of record in a city that was an early epicenter of coronavirus, put all of its COVID-related content outside the paywall and then saw, according to its senior vice president of marketing, Kati Erwert, “a very significant increase in digital subscriptions”—two to three times its previous daily averages. The Philadelphia Inquirer put its COVID content outside its paywall in the spring of 2020 as a public service. And then, according to the paper’s director of special projects, Evan Benn, it saw a “higher than usual number of digital subscription sign-ups.”

The Tampa Bay Times, The Denver Post, and The St. Paul Pioneer Press, in Minnesota, all experienced similar increases, as did papers operated by the Tribune Publishing Company, including the Chicago Tribune and the Hartford Courant. The new subscribers were readers who appreciated the content and the reporting and wanted to support the paper’s efforts, and to make the coverage free for others to read, too.

Good journalism isn’t cheap, but outlets can find creative ways to pay for their reporting on the election. They can enlist foundations or other sponsors to underwrite their work. They can turn to readers who are willing to subscribe, renew their subscriptions, or make added donations to subsidize important coverage during a crucial election. And they can take advantage of the broader audience that unpaywalled stories can reach, using it to generate more advertising revenue—and even more civic-minded subscribers.

The reason papers suspend their paywall in times of crisis is because they understand that the basic and primary mission of the press is to inform and educate the public. This idea goes back to the country’s Founders. The press was protected by the First Amendment so it could provide the information that voters need in a democracy. “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “and that cannot be limited without being lost.” Every journalist understands this. There is no story with a larger impact than an election in which the survival of democracy is on the ballot.

I believe it was a mistake to give away journalism for free in the 1990s. Information is not and never has been free. I devoutly believe that news organizations need to survive and figure out a revenue model that allows them to do so. But the most important mission of a news organization is to provide the public with information that allows citizens to make the best decisions in a constitutional democracy. Our government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and that consent is arrived at through the free flow of information—reliable, fact-based information. To that end, news organizations should put their election content in front of their paywall. The Constitution protects the press so that the press can protect constitutional democracy. Now the press must fulfill its end of the bargain.

Suppose the president asked you to design the ideal piece of legislation—the perfect mix of good politics and good policy. You’d probably want to pick something that saves people a lot of money. You’d want it to fix a problem that people have been mad about for a long time, in an area that voters say they care about a lot—such as, say, health care. You’d want it to appeal to voters across the political spectrum. And you’d want it to be a policy that polls well.

You would, in other words, want something like letting Medicare negotiate prescription-drug prices. This would make drugs much more affordable for senior citizens—who vote like crazy—and, depending on the poll, it draws support from 80 to 90 percent of voters. The idea has been championed by both Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin. Turn it into reality, and surely you’d see parades in your honor in retirement communities across the country.

Except Joe Biden did turn that idea into reality, and he seems to have gotten approximately zero credit for it. Tucked into the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was a series of measures to drastically lower prescription-drug costs for seniors, including by allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. And yet Biden trails Donald Trump in most election polls and has one of the lowest approval ratings of any president in modern American history.

In that respect, drug pricing is a microcosm of Biden’s predicament—and a challenge to conventional theories of politics, in which voters reward politicians for successful legislation. Practically nothing is more popular than lowering drug prices, and yet the popularity hasn’t materialized. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Politically speaking, does policy matter at all?

High drug prices are not a fact of nature. In 2018, the average list price of a month’s worth of insulin was $12 in Canada, $11 in Germany, and $7 in Australia. In the U.S., it was $99. America today spends more than seven times per person on retail prescription drugs than it did in 1980, and more than one in four adults taking prescription drugs in the U.S. report difficulty affording them.

Short of direct price caps, the most obvious way to address the problem is to let Medicare—which, with 65 million members, is the nation’s largest insurer—negotiate prices with drug manufacturers. Just about every other rich country does a version of this, which is partly why Americans pay nearly three times more for prescription drugs than Europeans and Canadians do. Price negotiation would slash costs for Medicare beneficiaries, while cutting annual federal spending by tens of billions of dollars.

The pharmaceutical industry argues that lower prices will leave companies with less money to invest in inventing new, life-saving medicines. But the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that even if drug companies’ profits dropped 15 to 25 percent as a result of price negotiation, that would prevent only 1 percent of all new drugs from coming to market over the next decade.

[Ezekiel J. Emanuel: Big Pharma’s go-to defense of soaring drug prices doesn’t add up]

Medicare drug-price negotiation has nonetheless had a tortured three-decade journey to becoming law. Bill Clinton made it a central plank of his push to overhaul the American health-care system, an effort that went down in flames after a massive opposition campaign by all corners of the health-care industry. Barack Obama campaigned on the idea but quickly abandoned it in order to win drug companies’ support for the Affordable Care Act. In 2016, even Donald Trump promised to “negotiate like crazy” on drug prices, but he never did.

Joe Biden accomplished what none of his predecessors could. The Inflation Reduction Act is best known for its clean-energy investments, but it also empowered Medicare to negotiate prices for the drugs that seniors spend the most money on. In February of this year, negotiations began for the first 10 of those drugs, on which Medicare patients collectively spend $3.4 billion out of pocket every year—a number that will go down dramatically when the newly negotiated prices come into effect. The IRA will also cap Medicare patients’ out-of-pocket costs for all drugs, including those not included on the negotiation list, at $2,000 a year, and the cost of insulin in particular at $35 a month. (In 2022, the top 10 anticancer drugs cost a Medicare patient $10,000 to $15,000 a year on average.) And it effectively prohibits drug companies from raising prices on other medications faster than inflation. “Right now, many people have to choose between getting the care they need and not going broke,” Stacie Dusetzina, a cancer researcher at Vanderbilt University, told me. “These new policies change that.”

Yet they don’t seem to have caused voters to warm up to Biden. The president’s approval rating has remained stuck at about 40 percent since before the IRA passed, lower than any other president at this point in their term since Harry Truman. A September AP/NORC poll found that even though more than three-quarters of Americans supported the drug-price negotiation, just 48 percent approved of how Biden was handling the issue of prescription-drug prices. A similar dynamic holds across other elements of the Biden agenda. In polls, more than two-thirds of voters say they support Biden’s three major legislative accomplishments—the IRA, the CHIPS Act, and the bipartisan infrastructure bill—and many individual policies in those bills, including raising taxes on the wealthy and investing in domestic manufacturing, poll in the 70s and 80s.

All of this poses a particular challenge for the “popularism” theory. After Biden barely squeaked by Donald Trump in 2020, an influential group of pollsters, pundits, and political consultants began arguing that the Democratic Party had become associated with policies, such as “Defund the police,” that alienated swing voters. If Democrats were serious about winning elections, the argument went, they would have to focus on popular “kitchen table” issues and shut up about their less mainstream views on race and immigration. Drug-price negotiation quickly became the go-to example; David Shor, a political consultant known for popularizing popularism, highlighted it as the single most popular of the nearly 200 policies his polling firm had tested in 2021.

One obvious possibility for why this has not translated into support for the president is that voters simply care more about other things, such as inflation. Another is that they are unaware of what Biden has done. A KFF poll from December found that less than a third of voters knows that the IRA allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices, and even fewer are aware of the bill’s other drug-related provisions. Perhaps that’s because these changes mostly haven’t happened yet. The $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket costs doesn’t come into effect until 2025, and the first batch of new negotiated prices won’t kick in until 2026. Or perhaps, as some popularists argue, it’s because Biden and his allies haven’t talked about those things enough. “I’m concerned that Democrats are dramatically underperforming their potential in terms of talking about healthcare policy and making healthcare debates a salient issue in 2024,” the blogger Matthew Yglesias wrote in October.

When I raised this critique with current and former members of the Biden administration, the sense of frustration was palpable. “The president is constantly talking about things like lowering drug prices and building roads and bridges,” Bharat Ramamurti, a former deputy director for Biden’s National Economic Council, told me. “We read the same polling as everyone else. We know those are popular.” He pointed out that, for instance, Biden has spoken at length about lowering prescription-drug prices in every one of his State of the Union addresses.

The problem, Ramamurti argues, is that the press doesn’t necessarily cover what the president says. Student-debt cancellation gets a lot of coverage because it generates a lot of conflict: progressives against moderates, activists against economists, young against old—which makes for juicy stories. The unfortunate paradox of super-popular policies is that, almost by definition, they fail to generate the kind of drama needed to get people to pay attention to them.

Both sides have a point here. It’s true that Biden’s drug-pricing policies have received relatively little media coverage, but it’s also up to politicians and their campaigns to find creative ways to generate interest in the issues they want people to focus on. Simply listing policy accomplishments in a speech or releasing a fact sheet about how they will help people isn’t enough. (The same problem applies to other issue areas. According to a Data for Progress poll, for example, only 41 percent of likely voters were aware as of early March that Biden had increased investments in infrastructure.)

[Ronald Brownstein: Americans really don’t like Trump’s health-care plans]

For the White House, the task of getting the word out may become easier in the coming months, as voters finally begin to feel the benefits of the administration’s policies. The cap on annual out-of-pocket drug costs kicked in only at the beginning of the year (this year, it’s about $3,500, and it will fall to $2,000 in 2025); presumably some Medicare-enrolled voters will notice as their medication costs hit that number. In September, just in time for the election, Biden will announce new prices for the 10 drugs currently being negotiated.

Another assist could come from efforts to stop the law from taking effect. Last year, multiple pharmaceutical companies and industry lobbying groups filed lawsuits, many in jurisdictions with Trump-appointed judges, to prevent Medicare from negotiating drug prices; meanwhile, congressional Republicans have publicly come out against the IRA overall and drug-price caps in particular. As the failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017 showed, few things rally support for a policy like the prospect of it being taken away.

The more pessimistic outlook is that voters’ impressions of political candidates have little to do with the legislation those candidates pass or the policies they support. Patrick Ruffini, a co-founder of the polling firm Echelon Insights, pointed out to me that, in 2020, when voters were asked which presidential candidate was more competent, Biden had a nine-point advantage over Trump; today Trump has a 16-point advantage. “I don’t know if there’s any amount of passing popular policies that can overcome that,” Ruffini said.

That doesn’t make the policy stakes of the upcoming election any lower. If he’s reelected, Biden wants to expand Medicare’s drug negotiation to 50 drugs a year and extend the out-of-pocket spending caps to the general population. Trump, meanwhile, has said he is going to “totally kill” the Affordable Care Act and that he intends to dismantle the IRA. There’s some drama for you. Whether it will get anyone’s attention remains to be seen.