How Social media seized American journalism and why nobody cares
Pew Center polls show people aren't much interested in social media bias or accuracy
My dad and I watched the Iowa girls’ basketball championships on Iowa PBS in early March.
The Iowa PBS crew put on a good show, as usual, but one thing kept nagging me.
During breaks in the game, one of the announcers mentioned that the games were simulcast on X, Facebook, and YouTube.
How completely social media companies have taken over our national communication apparatuses, I thought.
Iowa PBS reaches every corner of the state with its legion of broadcast towers. They have more reach than any commercial station.
Yet in the middle of one of their best live broadcasts of the year, they share their content on for-profit corporations worth billions.
This is not a criticism of Iowa PBS — far from it. It’s just the moment I realized our media cannot separate itself from the omnipresence of social media.
If you’re not there, you don’t exist.
I’m sure Iowa PBS wanted to make sure everyone had a chance to watch the games regardless of their chosen device.
Yet social media companies’ tentacles reach so deep into our media that even something as innocent as the Iowa girls’ state basketball tournament must be sullied by the mentions of Facebook, YouTube, and X.
Nearly all media does it. Every newspaper and TV station urges their audience to follow them on social media.
Social media companies have performed the greatest heist in American history and like all confidence games, they’ve done it with the willing participation of the mark.
Legacy media didn’t realize they’d been hoodwinked until they were too weak to fight back.
Now if your product is not on social media, you might as well not exist.
News organizations distributing their content on their websites and apps was one thing. At least they were using their platforms to publish their content.
But no website compares to the billions of potential audiences that social media audience offers.
Facebook boasts 3 billion active monthly users as of 2023. Facebook's parent company, Meta, also owns Instagram and the messaging app WhatsApp, each with 2 billion users.
YouTube, owned by Google parent Alphabet boasts 2.5 billion users.
The controversial Chinese-owned TikTok has 1.6 billion and X offers 611 million.
Content from local media isn’t going to reach all those users, but media executives hope sharing their content through social media will bring them eyeballs and revenue.
In the middle 1990s during the rise of the internet, newspapers made the disastrous decision to give away their content on their websites while they asked their subscribers to pay increasingly higher prices for increasingly anemic print products.
The industry never recovered. The print subscribers evaporated. And when news websites tried to put up paywalls, subscriptions did not follow in the same volume as the more profitable print subscriptions.
Website advertising was never the moneymaker print ads were.
American newspapers, and to a degree even broadcast media, are almost wholly dependent on social media to reach their audience.
And that’s when you realize how deep the grift goes.
Social media companies produce nothing, but they have a stranglehold on the delivery system. Social media sites and apps have replaced trucks, broadcast towers, and websites as the default way to share news.
They’ve usurped or disrupted nearly every media company’s ability to control the distribution of their content.
Sophisticated algorithms decide what users see and don’t see.
Facebook’s algorithms, for example, factors in a post’s likes, reactions, and comments. The more interaction a post gets, the more likely it is to appear in your feed.
The algorithms don’t care about accuracy or bias, but that’s OK because neither does the audience.
A recent Pew Research Center poll showed at least half of Americans sometimes get their news from social media, favoring speed and convenience.
But Pew polls also showed only 40% of Americans disliked the inaccuracy of news on social media and just 6% disliked the biases of stories.
Artificial intelligence is already making the algorithms better at predicting what people want and pushing content that keeps them angry, scared, or entertained — which keeps the audience scrolling longer.
The problem with that is sometimes what you need to know is not necessarily what you want to know.
Further, not everything is supposed to be entertaining and we, as a nation, have a hard time with dispassionate discussion.
We live in a time when it’s hard to believe anything, in part because soulless, unaccountable social media controls how and what we see of practically everything.
So, what can be done?
I recommend skepticism and fact-checking as a regular part of individuals’ daily routines.
And if that doesn’t work, follow me on Facebook at @paragraphstacker or X at @newsmanone.
Daniel P. Finney, a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative, wrote for newspapers for 27 years before being laid off in 2020. He teaches middle school English now. Please consider a paid subscription.
And subscribing to newspapers is like dealing with a “used car salesperson.” I got an email from one of my subscriptions saying that it would go to $20/month from $7. When I called to cancel, I was offered a price of $5/month. This basic pattern has happened for more than one newspaper.
Appreciate your perspective on this sad trend. I try to support the Des Moines Register by continuing my subscription. The decline in the quality of writing, lack of proofreading for grammatical and spelling errors (not to mention plain old wrong words) and photos that are years old and don't match the content of the story make it difficult to hold on. I still prefer the quality that remains to what is online through social media. Thanks, Daniel.