How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers? 
Yes this is a problem. Occasionally I have to to resort to emailing authors directly and asking for a copy of the paper - in most cases they have been obliging.As far as I am concerned publicly funded research papers should (must) be freely available. If the public are funding it then the public has a right to the fruits of this investment. And newspapers must be able to link to or reference a source when they quote or review academic literature (in fact I think it should be law that they have to).A very simple solution would be for authors or institutions to make copies freely available on their websites. I can only assume that they are not allowed to, due to copyright imposed by the journals.It's ironic that the invention of the www was driven by the need for an easy way to freely distribute and share academic literature.P.S. There's also a strong case for privately funded research to be made public too. Companies who make product claims based on privately funded research for example absolutely must make this research ("research") available for the public to review. It is notoriously hard to get pharma firms to cough up the papers which support their claims for the latest wonder drug.