3 ms·

Serious question - how many of those many news sources have you taken the time to trace their ownership or influencers? As an example, you mentioned BuzzFeed -

Serious question - how many of those many news sources have you taken the time to trace their ownership or influencers? As an example, you mentioned BuzzFeed - did you know that Comcast nee NBCUniversal invested roughly $400M into them[1] in the last couple years? Or that they were caught deleting posts[2] critical of their advertisers in 2015? Did you know that Huffington Post, Engadget, and TechCrunch are all owned by Verizon[3]? I'm not sure the proliferation of sources amounts to much, as many of those sources are hardly independent at the end of the day. What's your favorite flavor of tech news.. Verizon or Comcast? I'm not being fatalistic here, I'm saying that most people don't bother to do this work, and so they aren't aware of how few owners actually exist in the journalism market. This is not a healthy state of affairs. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed#Funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed#Funding [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed#Advertiser_influence_on_editorial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed#Advertiser_influence_... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_Inc

forapurpose 8y ago
That is very informative and helpful; thank you. I wasn't aware or didn't remember all that. I still think there's more diversity now than before the Internet. There are several more publications in my locale, for example, and some are more focused on local public affairs than the leading local newspapers were (which I assume have to appeal to a wider audience). And there are the other sources I mentioned. Do you know if it's objectively worse than before the Internet?