Absolutely this. Rich people have routinely purchased or put up news outlets to promote their agendas for ages. The difference these days is that content can

Absolutely this. Rich people have routinely purchased or put up news outlets to promote their agendas for ages. The difference these days is that content can be copied and distributed at zero cost, and that content (and money-making advertising) can also be targeted, monitored, and tuned. It’s a propagandist’s dream. The problem is that people still only have 24 hours in a day. Most of it is spent sleeping and working. There’s only so much information people will actively consume, which gives way to passive binge consumption of the likes of Netflix and Reddit. The latter has so much user-created or recirculated material that a potentially valuable set of eyeballs to a publisher could instead be spending their free time mindlessly clicking through a series of amusing sloth gifs. All of this leads to a race to the bottom amidst diminishing returns, both for the publisher and the reader. The Washington Post, for example, is flooded with redundancy for the sake of anti-Trump catharsis clicks. There is one silver lining for the owners behind the media glut: people have less spending money than they used to for entertainment, so free or cheap stimulation from the likes of non-or-bypassable paywalled news sources or Netflix does give publishers something resembling a captive audience.