Everyone who follows media and tech policy knows that Facebook has helped spread around a lot of really poisonous stuff. From the rise of domestic conspiracy theories to outright genocide in Myanmar, some of the worst things in the world today have been facilitated by Facebook and social media. We focus on those horrors because they're really bad, and because they're really bad in a way that is relatively new to U.S. media.
Facebook and Google have also been instrumental in decimating plausible business models for American journalism. The two tech titans are essential distributors for any news outlet, but they roll up so much of the ad market that there isn't anything left for the institutions that actually report and edit.
This creates an obvious Journalism vs. Big Tech dynamic in which Big Tech sucks all of the resources out of serious reporting and editing. Without major regulatory changes to the tech world, journalism will be completely dependent on philanthropy and public investment. Both of those sources of funding have always been important, but it’s obviously good to have news outlets that can actually turn a profit. Every funding structure has some drawback regarding journalistic independence and it's important to have different structures out there to balance those weaknesses.
So Big Tech is wrecking American journalism. But not all journalism is being wrecked equally. In particular, the rise of social media sharing and SEO has amplified the power of cable news.
When I started at HuffPost in 2010, clipping cable news hits was not a dominant editorial focus. HuffPost was still a pretty young site, and the majority of our editorial energy was devoted to differentiating HuffPost from more established outlets. HuffPost wanted to be something different, something fun, something with a ton of populist economic policy coverage. You can't do different and populist by repurposing cable news hits.
We didn't ignore newsworthy TV interviews, of course, and we covered the Sunday politics shows pretty relentlessly. But that material was handled by reporters and editors who knew the political background of whatever was being discussed. I won't claim that every Sunday show write-up from 2011 was a super nuanced deep-dive into the policy problem at hand, but editors would rightfully get on your case if you just clipped something some politician said with a headline like "Politician Says Crazy Thing OMG Look." You were supposed to give readers something substantive to help them understand the issues of the day.
But as resources for digital media have declined and tech platforms have prioritized video content, there has been a pretty serious shift in the digital news world toward buzzy cable news clips. It costs a lot more to send a team of investigative reporters into the field than it does to post a TV clip of somebody saying something insane. A lot of digital media now consists of different brands fighting Facebook-share and SEO wars with each other over the same vitriolic cable clips.
There are of course different kinds of cable news shows and plenty of excellent journalists working in TV. But a lot of cable news is just terrible. It's so bad, in fact, that most people don't like to watch it. Tucker Carlson has the most popular show on cable news, but he only gets about 2.8 million viewers a night. The NBA Finals is more than tripling Carlson's viewership for a series between teams from two small cities. Monday Night Football averages about 12 million viewers. Network TV dramas do even better. The CBS series Equalizer pulled in over 20 million viewers. This is why you see expensive fancy car ads during popular shows, and weird low-budget goldbug ads during commercial breaks on Fox.
The point here is that a huge proportion of people who interact with Fox News material get it not through TV but through social media. It's social media where TV news personalities really get famous -- not TV viewership. This creates terrible incentives for cable news, where more conflict and more outrageousness are required to break through the social media outrage fog.
This problem is under-appreciated because we're used to thinking of journalism and Big Tech as adversaries, and because Big Tech has created a lot of other new problems that also demand serious attention. Cable news is an old problem, but it's a big problem. If you can’t stand cable news, one way to fix it is to rein in Big Tech and establish sustainable business models for responsible journalism.
Here’s a happy dog in the woods: