Clueless: Tulsa World News Site

Where I live in Oklahoma, the state capital is just a few miles west. It’s a busy place with all the horrors of any modern socialist bureaucracy. Some of the buildings are almost tolerable, but most are ugly as sin. They stand as an island of power and prestige, with too little public parking, and half surrounded by poverty and decrepit housing. Awhile back some big politics and private investment turned some of squalor back into decent housing for upper middle class liberal folks. It meant kicking a bunch of poor folks out, of course. In other words, pretty ordinary place as smaller state capitals go.
The real money and power in the state is mostly in Tulsa, a couple hours’ drive northeast of here up Interstate 44. It’s a different kind of stupid there. It’s where most of the big church money is in this state, too. The big church money here in OKC area is divided between liberals and conservatives, but in Tulsa it’s just about all conservative, though of different versions mixed together, and lots more zeros in their bank accounts. But it’s still stupid.
A primary example is the website of a big newspaper, the Tulsa World. Not too long ago they upgraded their site. Now, you are not permitted to visit their web pages unless you accept a huge collection of predatory tracking cookies, and allow them to run all sorts of very annoying and distracting JavaScript animations. I’ve tried a couple of times to ask them if they realized their site was not simply non-compliant with standards, but openly hostile to blind users, for example. Never got an answer back.
It’s their site. They can do what they like. But it’s everybody’s Internet. I’m not one to grab an attorney and file an ADA lawsuit, which would probably get some traction, since that newspaper pretends they are public servants and the local governments are required to post certain public notices with them. Instead, I’ll simply try to embarrass them a little by making some noise here on my quiet little blog.
But if you bother to read this whinygram of mine, perhaps you’ll give some consideration to pressuring the Tulsa World and other similar cranky websites. These people do not get it. They are still operating under all the assumptions of a paper-printing operation, and can’t imagine the Internet is any different.
Oh, and while I don’t have to run a business, nor a whole website of that size, I do have friends who do. Advertising is one thing, but I am assured by some pretty honest and ethical folks there is simply no valid excuse for demanding people accept tracking cookies, nor requiring them to tolerate dancing and spinning graphics just to make a profit on their news presentation. Tulsa World folks are greedy slimeballs, the sort who would sell their mothers for the right price. I say that, of course, based on other information I have about them which has nothing to do with the Internet. Hey, this is the MSM, after all.