>> Today, just six conglomerates — Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Sony, Fox, and Paramount Global (formerly known as ViacomCBS) — control 90% of what you watch, read, or listen to.
No google/youtube? No twitter? No facebook? Is this article from the past? Most people do not get their information from the television and so I doubt these six control most of anything.
> Most people do not get their information from the television and so I doubt these six control most of anything.
I know a lot of people who get the majority of their news either from television, or from media properties that they would see on TV, but via the Internet instead.
But I understood part of the point of the article to not be solely about "news" per se, but about general produced media content. And if that's the case, then the list given makes sense to me (Facebook doesn't make TV shows, at least that I know of.)
For general media, Netflix/Amazon? iTunes? ThePirateBay? PornHub? The number of organizations generating and/or delivering content so vast and diverse that I cannot understand how any small group could get their hands around most of anything. I watched a Doctor Who episode today (horrible, bad effects, bad acting). Which of the six owns the BBC?
Most of the content on any of these is produced by companies on the OP's list.
> PornHub
I mean, it's likely that in general this kind of estimate is ignoring things that are not considered savory so porn is gonna be underrepresented for sure. It's probably not going to move the needle as much as you think though.
> BBC
A lot of BBC's content is produced outside this set of companies, but it's likely that some of it is at least co-produced with companies on the list, usually for the sake of international distribution. This probably counts as some degree of 'control', which doesn't necessarily imply direct ownership.
Outside of the BBC, on the private British networks (and in general wrt any regional media production) this kind of co-production arrangement is really common.
The only people that I know of that still get the majority of their news from TV is people of my parents generation, who are in their 70s. I’m in my 50s and none of my acquaintances of a similar age watch broadcast TV, or even use social media.
I’m in my 50s and none of my acquaintances of a similar age watch broadcast TV, or even use social media.
It doesn't matter if they're instead binging tv shows on streaming platforms produced by production studios owned by those 6 companies. In fact, it doesn't even matter if they are binging youtube channels or tiktok "influencers", all of which are seemingly independent, but are in fact being funded by new media studios owned by those 6 companies.
Those companies control a lot more than you think. The fact that people are unaware of it is a feature of that control, not a bug.
In the most recent Pew survey on media habits, TV was still far and away the leading source of news. For people who prefer to use a computer, tablet or phone to read the news, the websites of traditional media companies was their preference. Nothing else even approaches the popularity of traditional news orgs. And for people who do get news from social media, Facebook is the most popular source by a large margin.
So you may not know any TV watchers outside of your parents (which is also true for me), there are somehow millions and millions of TV news watchers out there.
Suppose I watch Fox News for an hour and then read Reddit for an hour (either posts, linked articles, or comments, your choice). How is that counted? I am reading 5-10x as much content on Reddit as I am seeing/hearing on TV.
Not sure but when asked which medium they preferred, respondents ranked all social media (including Reddit) a distant fourth. Among social media sites Reddit was 5th, behind Instagram, in terms of how many people said they used it specifically for news. This particular survey does not seem to ask about time spent.
Much of the media gets their "news" from other media. Take Jan 2021 for example. Remember how quickly "insurection" proliferated? Just an example, but this happens all the time. These "news" outlets are so desperate to be relevate and keep the clicks clicking (and revenue chaching'ing) that they reiterate without little or no filter.
Better to parrot than to be left behind. The current system rewards parrotting more than it does discretion.
* I get access to 1,100,295 DRM-free books in several formats (including Word, EPUB, computer-narrated audio) via Bookshare.org [~$50/year]
* I get access to 40,000+ professionally narrated books via the National Library Service through the Library of Congress in the US [Free]
* I get access to 80,000+ volunteer narrated books via LearningAlly.org (formerly Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic) [$135/year]
* I get access to hundreds of magazines and newspapers, including breaking news services, via the National Federation for the Blind NewsLine [Free]
* I get reciprocity with other countries' libraries for the print-disabled around the world, which is useful as I am learning new languages. [Usually Free]
This is nice because I also never have a need to go to websites that serve ads to me. Of course it's called uBlock Origin and using ProtonVPN with Anti-tracking + Ad-blocking features plus such as a Pi-Hole...but still...I have it good.
I get news from all of the providers you listed, but they don’t produce the content. The actual content is from the big media companies like CNBC, CNN, Fox News, WSJ, and NY Times.
These online media are content aggregators. They help socialize and propagate narratives, but they don’t produce narratives. They certainly amplify the echo chamber effect.
> big media companies like CNBC, CNN, Fox News, WSJ, and NY Times
Of those, the six companies mentioned by the grandparent (Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Sony, Fox, Paramount) only own CNBC and Fox. CNN is owned by Warner Bros, WSJ is owned by News Corp (of course, the link to Fox through Murdoch is relevant), and NYT is its own company.
> Most people do not get their information from the television
Uh... yes they do. Most people in your particular subculture probably don't. I don't. But the majority of "news" consumption in the modern west happens via live television.
The death of TV news is being overstated by the above poster but it's certainly no longer the dominant form of news media. Among the younger age demographics on Hacker News I really can't imagine many people are willing to tolerate the insufferable cable news format with massive and frequent ad breaks.
Don't forget apple and amazon. People always forget about amazon and their media offerings tied to Prime membership.
But I agree, tech monopolies are just as worrying as the media monopolies. I'd imagine the next period of consolidation will be tech + media. With the amount of cash tech companies have lying around and the market cap differential between tech and media, these media conglomerates would be absorbed without a sweat.
Not according to professional content creators. Every one I have ever talked to openly states that they regularly alter their content to optimize compliance with youtube algorithms. Content is controlled, promoted, diminished, monetized or eliminated by the algorithms which are the embodiment of youtube's policy decisions. If you want to actually make a living on youtube, you will care as much about what youtube thinks of your content as you do your viewers.
> They host but don’t control content via e.g. editorial policy, ideology or private interests.
They absolutely do control content, by banning content that violates the TOS. And they do make editorial decisions in terms of what content they promote, and what is rewarded by monetization.
And to be clear there isn't anything nefarious about this, nor does it cause these platforms to lose Section 230 protections (despite how often people claim it does).
But the fallback these content delivery networks always use to avoid regulatory scrutiny is always to promote these traditional producers at the expense of independent voices.
Google, Youtube and Facebook aren't news producers, they aggregate and provide content in feed form. First order journalism, the people that actually point the cameras at things are largely the mentioned commercial institutions, the rest is commentary.
There's the production end, which this article covers. Then there's the distribution end, which is where tech companies come in. Both are problematic in different ways.
To be fair, the word used was "control". The HN title is, once again, distorting the content of the submission. The author's discussion is focused on media consolidation and the slow death of local news, not Big Tech's control over what people consume. (Though she does cite Big Tech's practice of censoring independent news sources.)
Yes, but without the title preceding it, the statement loses its context.
It baffles me when people want to override authors on titles. Sure, sometimes it might make sense to do so, but most of the time the author is the person in the best position to present and explain what she has written.
If this was the HN title I would not necessarily think about Big Tech.
Then when I began reading the blog post I would quickly see it is about media consolidation and the decline of local news, not about Big Tech intermediary (middleman) control over the delivery of media that some other entity has produced.
This is only Part 1, so there may be more about Big Tech in Parts 2 and 3.
How is this promoting an agenda? I hate when people hate on frivolous things when it doesn’t fit their agenda. Republicans called this out and it was largely ignore (I know, i was one of them calling it out) and now people are upset they used the subtitle instead of the more liberal friendly main title?
The people who actually point their camera at things are everyday people with smartphones. The majority of "news" content I've seen taken with a camera over the last few years was not been taken by a professional journalist.
The George Floyd story, maybe the story of the decade revolved around footage taken with a smartphone camera.
> The George Floyd story, maybe the story of the decade
Pandemic with millions of dead, war in Ukraine, huge scale corruption ( Pandora papers), COP26, an attempted coup in a supposedly liberal democracy to name just a few things from this decade, and a racially motivated murder by a policeman in the US is your pick for "the story of the decade" 2 years in? Sorry to burst your bubble but the vast majority of the planet doesn't care that much (beyond initial compassion) about racial problems in the US.
Ukraine war is a bigger story, just slipped my mind.
The Floyd story is bigger than a murder though, at least 19 people died in the ensuing protests, over 10 thousand were arrested, and there was a few billion in property damage.
Judging by personal experience a large portion of humanity gets their worldview from memes which are most certainly not produced by the aforementioned institutions.
I agree with you, but we also need to agree that even if you include G, YT, F; that probably would up the percentage to even higher levels and I would argue that they should be included in the cartel behavior because they and the likes of Twitter are all heavy censors/“publishers” that make it explicit how far they are willing to go to control what supposedly sovereign adults are allowed/can see.
Yeah but they choose what, from all that produced stuff, you will see and not-see. Which is a pretty big deal. Maybe bigger control than the producers.
Agree. The problem is the producers have been allowed to vertically align a distribution channel (Disney+, Paramount+, HBOMax, etc.), so it's not clearly distinguished. Google and Facebook are distributors of content, and the distributors control what people see.
The previous poster does have a point though. A lot of the 'news' people see on Facebook and the like are simply shared from other news outlets on facebook. Facebook doesn't produce the news but it disseminates it.
Because of this some countries even wanted to impose a facebook tax. Like Australia.
That is /so/ much nonsense. Doesn't matter how you editorialize by controlling what people see including with a trained algorithm optimized for "engagement" that tends to be pretty similar to "outrage." The second you "promote" a wider engagement on any article or topic at the expense of another you aren't pure or anything like it. And we'd be heroically naive if we really were willing to bet our own lives on someone not "tweaking" the algo for their own beliefs along the chain somewhere. I know I would if I saw too many pro-nazi content promoted, for example and that is editorial with nothing at all "pure" about it.
FB has never, ever been a "purely a platform" other than in their own PR releases. Censoring because politicians tell them to do it is a wholly different issue on top of that.
It's always been like that, from the very beginning. They never just let true laissez-faire with the news on the site, like they pretended to sometimes and it looked like a story "went viral" like out of control. The only time I remember a story really getting out of the control of the editor, was on reddit in the thread about tips waiters received from a certain race. Just hit a nerve like what the fuck, like they found out the conspiracy behind Santa Claus, the existence of stereotypes doesn't guarantee that reality is to the exact contrary. Patterns emerged with no machine learning, just thousands of screams into the void, which wasn't quite that empty a void. Those waiters weren't alone, and this was back when reddit was less bot-infested, it always has been and it always hasn't been, but back then it was harder to do a robotic painfully sincere tone. I do remember one argument against the current of that thread, one among hundreds, like Social Justice short circuit. If you tell someone it's just him with 9 bad experiences for every 1 good experience, just statistics, and for that to work of course you need them not to know more statistics like statistical estimates for the probability the statistics report can be proven to be a lie with very little data, you must never let them talk to anyone about their uniquely unlucky misfortune. You can make people really stupid by teaching them bad statistics but in groups it doesn't work. So on that note, Facebook and all the others have to keep an eye out and always moderate. And you know? I did that myself once, there was a site connecting travelers to people who wanted stuff from abroad, like a marketplace, and nobody moderated it for a while, I finally go and it's disgusting, all scammers, buyers and sellers everybody is a scammer, like I needed to blacklist the user database and start from nothing. So if I had done some regex to look for blatant stuff, I might have been able to salvage more of it.
I suppose the unmoderated self-image Facebook (and everyone else) tries to project, beyond being about reducing wage moneys by getting "users" to "generate" "content", is that it looks fresher, more meritocratic, anything could rise to the top, nowadays the obsession with virality is much less than six years ago but everyone buys into the fifteen minutes of fame thing.
I've never understood this statement. Do you have any trusted sources of news? Are you not able to read them directly on the web?
Maybe you're just saying you want news about X, and you're not sure where to find a source that can tell you about that, and this is where you find "control". What kind of control are you talking about here? Deliberate? Accidental? Algorithmic? Censoring?
They are a filtering function applied on top of primary content producers.
However, in the case of these six primary content producers, the distributors don't really do any filtering.
So, yes, the premise of the OP is correct. Six companies produce ~all of the media you consume, with a couple of distributor companies that deliver that media to you. If you're concerned about homogeneity of thought in media, you should be looking at the market share of the primary producers.
If you follow the link, it says Americans spend that amount of time daily with "major media", and no mention of news only. So that would presumably include reading/watching fiction, listening to music etc.?
> included are digital (online on desktop and laptop computers, mobile nonvoice and other connected devices), TV, radio, print (offline reading only), newspapers, magazines, radio, and television
Pretty big blunder in an article about media trustworthiness if you ask me.
This article is a freelance health/wellness writer dumping a spec pitch that didn’t sell on Substack to try to recoup a little of the invested work. The article was written toward an expected outcome starting from a Twitter poll, which means by the end of the lede it’s basically worthless because it exists only to confirm the author’s presupposition. That’s the polar opposite of journalism, despite what some folks would have you believe, and it’s why every editor she called presumably passed on this. Blunders throughout should surprise you next to zero because it’s basically a writer with Word open, a point to make (noticeably from a bad personal experience), and no support to keep it on track. And this is the kind of gun you want to make sure you’re aiming well. She isn’t.
Seriously, leading off with a Brandeis quote comes across as so horrifically pretentious it hurts. That the next graf is about a crisp November day almost made me close the tab immediately, and I’ve read some really bad work. The TL;DR being that long and then the article starting like that is a big, neon sign upon which is written “I badly need an editor.” And this is part 1! The horror!
Another blunder: the duplicated scripts are because lazy local producers take fully-produced packages off their network sources to fill time. I know because I’ve done it. If I’m three minutes light in my B block, I’m looking at the network’s stuff or CNN or whatever to get what I can. Something on trade relations? Cool. Throw it in! It’s already done! (Sinclair must-runs use the same mechanism and are just pushed on producers.) It’s not a local news producer watching a competitor’s air and writing it down word for word, as she seems to think it is with her “hence” behind that YouTube embed. An interesting oddity of news, but not the malevolent machine she’s implying.
(Yes, I ended up reading the whole thing. It’s an interest area; I was a local news director in TV and an assignment editor before my start in tech. The author understands next to nothing about the incentives nor economics of particularly newsgathering. I’d rebut it but I’d run out of room here. Why it’s on HN is beyond me, since not even Good Housekeeping would pick this drivel up. She’s onto something of course, and it’s a subject that deserves better study than this.)
This factoid actually just statistical error. The average person watches the news 0 hours a day. Tivo Georg, who interns on The Daily Show & watches over 10,000 hours of cable news each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted
I know people who spend all their working life with some podcast going over the topics of the day ad nauseum in their airpods. Then they get in the car and the podcast is still playing. Still playing while at the gym. Still playing cooking dinner. I know a few people who have to hear podcasts playing on their phone to be able to sleep now.
If its about current events usually its "lets take something that can be succinctly digested in three paragraphs from reuters and stretch it into 45 monetized minutes". I find podcasts are a lot of noise and not a lost of signal for the most part. It makes sense given the incentive structures.
If you follow throw to the link, it's more correct to say it says "Americans spend an average of 12 and half hours consuming media"
> In 2019, the average daily time spent with major media including television, newspapers, magazines, radio, and digital formats of each amounted to 750 minutes (12 hours and 30 minutes)
It's rather a bit inclusive that leads to a shock number.
Most Americans consume media most of the time, yes. I know people who haven't read a book since high school, but can tell you everything about either sports or celebrities, and often both. Indexical knowledge of sports and/or what celebrities have been up to for decades. This is what Americans do.
This is beyond the time they spend watching TV and movies. I would say for 90% of the people I know, this number is accurate. If you point it out, it's as if you're telling someone they need to lose weight. It's just not allowed by anyone besides Grandma or Grandpa anymore.
>This just doesn't make sense. The average American spends the majority of waking hours consuming news?
Oh for sure that's true. Politics/news that shouldn't be interesting to anyone, yet is extremely important to follow. It's practically life/death reality here. You're right though, it doesn't make sense. You get a single vote every couple years at most and can do nothing otherwise. So why care so much, it doesn't make sense?
"And you know what we have to do. This is a fuckin’ election year. We gotta be serious. Every able-bodied African-American must register for a legal firearm. That’s the only way they’ll change the law.”
“I’m clear that there’s no peaceful way to disarm America’s whites.”
“There’s only one thing that’s going to save this country from itself. Same thing that always saves this country from itself, and that is African Americans.”
Feels like a typo of "per week", not per day to me. An average of two hours a day feels high too but seems reasonable given the omnipresence of news content
I'm in political communications and am, in modern parlance, far Too Online. I definitely spend over 12 hours a day, and I'm one of the less engaged people in politics/civics fields that I've seen (depending on available time, of course).
Given people like us and the group of people that seems just plain ADDICTED to outrage bait/who hang out all day on Twitter, I think we might be skewing that number pretty drastically.
Either that or their definition of 'news' is wider than we'd expect and would include things like celebrity news. If we include keeping up with musicians/actors/Youtubers/etc. I wouldn't be shocked if that bumped up the numbers a lot.
Depends on what one classifies as 'news'? Is reading an article about how "Six companies control 90% of what you read, watch, and hear" news?
HN and Reddit links out to other sites (BBC, Ars Technica, Science Direct, etc): is being on HN and Reddit classified as dealing with news, entertainment, other?
How many Twitter threads are about an article on CNN, Fox News, ESPN, etc? Is the ensuing discussion related to 'news' or something else?
The source is about media in general, not news. This is about in line with what Nielsen reports. Keep in mind, this includes passive consumption like keeping the TV on for background noise.
yeah i work at a job when i can listen to audio books while i work on head phones i turn them on while getting ready for work listen through my whole shift and commute home so i can easily pull down 10 hours a day right there. I get home and the kids have the tv with there shows on there is a couple more hours even though i am not "watching" it its on near me. then i put on a old sitcom or star trek episode before i fall asleep so lets say another hour there. so i would pull down 13 hours of media consumption even if mine mostly falls outside of the normal type consumed.
I dont think most people can work all day while consuming media like i do though, so i suspect there is some populations segment with non normal media consumption habbits that has a outsized representation here most likely retirees that leave the tv on all day.
My anecdotal experience with the people I meet and talk with fall into two very clear buckets: those that read books and those that don't.
I've been able to predict with 100% accuracy so far (N=12) which bucket a person falls into solely based on if the person regurgitates mainstream narratives uncritically, regardless of political party. Having a discussion with someone that has additional information external to the narrative seems to be in short supply and stands out, probably more than it should.
I'm curious if anyone else on HN has experienced similar and/or can provide some further insight to this phenomena. Thanks!
It might also just depend in if you are good friends with someone or not. Anyone I consider a friend I could have a real conversation with about current events, but people revert to orthodoxy when talking to people they are unsure around. Reading definitely helps with critical thinking, but I think most regurgitation just comes from not being your friend. (And I've hypothesized there are actually large social groups that are not really friends. Anyone you would have to consider "political correctness" around for example. I think these larger groups do exist and call each other friends, and just regurgitate at each other. But I think it's that they're afraid of each other, of being denounced as a heretic, not that they don't read)
What counts as 'reading books'? Textbooks? Self help guides? Tourist guides? Comics? The protocols of the Elders of Zion? It's not all Dostoyevsky and Kant.
My hinge: you just divided your friends arbitrarily into 'blue-pilled' and 'red-pilled' and used some metric (probably observed with errors) to make one group look better.
Yeah, as a rule of thumb for rationality, if you only have two buckets, you haven't thought about the topic critically enough.
For books, there's a fairly simple explanation for a mental divide: elitism. Maybe you correlate ability to memorize trivia (which tends to be plentiful in books trying to illustrate some overarching point) with "culturedness". Or maybe the correlation comes from name dropping prolific authors (common in humanities, because certain authors "represent" certain schools of thought). Etc.
In my personal experience, the book reading anecdote doesn't really hold because a lot of people I know simply have complex backgrounds (e.g. living large portions of their lives in two or more different countries) and that alone can bring a lot of color to discussions.
As a rule of thumb for rationality, buckets are mental models -- tools -- and can be treated as such. Drawing a dichotomy, while incomplete, can be useful given the balance between accuracy and parsimony.
I find so called book read to be boring to talk to.
I personally get along with people who watch youtube, discuss in forums, chatrooms, and read wikipedia and similar sources. The best discussions I had where in Discord and 4chan. Some people are extreme there but at least there is an honest curiosity when you discuss. And openness to reach a conclusion or to convince the opposing side of what is wrong.
The book readers are kinda parrots who will go on rants about the perspective of some authors, then they will tell you the author is great and give you fun facts about him (he is the first to do this, and he did this and this, and was respected by the high school of something in paris).
Also you are (and I am not) in a position to classify people to being critical thinkers or not, being a critical thinker seem to be often than not agreeing with you, or disagreeing with the crown. Hard to argue for what's critical thinking *based on conclusion*. I personally consider flat earthers to be more of a critical thinker that the average person, they have a drive to seek truth, they base that journey on theory and experience. I will be honest the average person has little ways to know that he lives on a sphere, if we exclude the obvious clue that is "why would anyone benefit from lying to us that we live in a sphere", you can't just easily do an experiment that can just prove beyond reason scientifically that we live on a sphere.
HN is one of the smuggest communities who think the are the intelligentsia of the world, "excuse me guys we the book reader tribe are smart!!!!!!".
I've seen the same thing. Apparently 33% of people haven't read a book since high school and 42% haven't read a book since college. It's shocking statistics.
I myself had a protracted dry spell of book reading but picked it up again about 5 years ago and noticed that it really turned my brain "on" so to speak. My vocabulary increased, but I also felt I was able to store and retrieve information from my brain much quicker.
"I've seen the same thing. Apparently 33% of people haven't read a book since high school and 42% haven't read a book since college. It's shocking statistics."
I'm inclined to agree. Do you happen to have a source though?
If 53% of all adults read at least one book in the last twelve months (as in 2017), it's still possible that the 33%/42% numbers could also be accurate ... but it's extremely unlikely. It would require an almost complete separation between habitual readers and non-readers, with practically nobody in between who has read books some years but not others. You only have to do that once in your entire life to shift from one column to the other. I rather suspect that the scary numbers are for relatively young adults, which is a non-representative sample of the whole, and that they're being misremembered or misrepresented as pertaining to the entire adult population.
P.S. The 53% number is still enough to make me very sad. It's bad. I'm just saying it's probably not that bad.
How do you keep books from completely consuming your free time? For me, whenever I get into a good book I don't want to put it down. I'll read a few hours after my normal bedtime. I'll skip everything I wanted to do over a weekend just to finish a book or book series. Even to the point of reading while in traffic (that I fixed by getting unabridged audio book versions, and switching to that while in traffic and back to paper book when I get home).
Then the other issue I have is that since I know a book will consume me, I have a hard time deciding on the next book to read as I don't want to invest a chunk of time getting part way through it, just to find out that a given book is junk.
Also I have a number of really good books that are on my abandoned book pile. These are ones that I started reading, go half way through then got back into "life" mode. Then after not reading it for a couple months I have a hard time picking up where I left off (already lost parts of the plot), but I can't start from the beginning either because I already read that part. I have to wait till I mostly forget the parts I read in order to start them again.
In your situation, it's going to at first being all about discipline and sticking to a schedule. It helps if you have others in your life that you are beholden to, i.e. there are personal commitments that you must sacrifice for. Which, incidentally, makes you a better, more outwardly focused individual.
Past couple of years made me believe that 90% of humanity is actually incapable of critical thinking and actually are not that much different from animals. Most of the humans actually just act on instinct and that’s it.
I honestly lost all respect I had for general populace.
I know quite a few people who have additional information or don't regurgitate mainstream narratives. You're still unlikely to have a conversation about most issues with them since they tend not to enjoy discussing their views knowing that most potential conversations will just be the narratives they already heard.
>Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
Scary, isn't it. I went on a date once with a regurgiator. Made me feel like I was talking to a drone that takes all direction from queen bee T.V.. We're living in science fiction territory now.
I haven't had that experience. I can think of many people in my life who read books yet have a very conventional, restricted worldview. I also know people who read books and regurgitate them mindlessly. If you put a parrot around different people, it'll learn new phrases -- but it'll still be a parrot.
Books are nice, but I'm not sure they determine whether or not you think for yourself.
Yep, based on the types of things somebody likes to talk about, the banality of their view of the world, what they simply regurgitate, what sort of nuance they bring (or can pick up on), pretty much allows you to place them in either bucket. And suffice it to say that the former bucket contains the least interesting people to talk with.
Anecdotally, as a life long STEM nerd, even smart people are boring.
I tire of discussing the potential of a theory; sure let me add that to the pile of a hundred others I heard about this month. How one was able to link two well known math objects by adding a few more of the well known glyphs; no one has ever done that before.
When one of you is on the verge of actually replacing relativity, or falsifying entropy, a warp drive, uploading kung fu to my consciousness; sure let’s hear it.
And FFS am I tired of listening to startup stories; it’s the new “read my script.” Machine aided reductions of daily life stats is a prosaic story to tell to someone who has been writing software since the 80s.
The two buckets I'd put people in are those who regurgitate mainstream news and those who ignore it completely. In other words, the brainwashed and the braindead. People who read books have become outliers. Social media has destroyed people's attention span.
> of people rated their trust in mainstream media as either “very low” or “low.”
It isn't a necessary data point for the the overall argument of the article really, just a motivating anecdote. They could have opened with "Everyone says they don't like mainstream media, but..."
I think the bigger issue is what % of content is being filtered through a recommendation algorithm that has been trained on probably very similar metrics.
Even if there are 6-20-100 companies if they are all using similar metrics, ad clicks, retention and so on in terms of what to recommend people it seems likely there will be a high degree of convergence.
What does society look like when most of what we consume is optimized for these metrics? It also changes what content is even created. There is a lot of talk about politics/elections but I think the changes are even more far reaching.
Weirdly I think this video is one of the most disturbing. Makes you really question to what degree our collective culture is being shaped by these recommendation systems.
The algorithmic construction of reality.
Designed to drip feed us dopamine in high definition. How many people are going to be on their deathbed wishing they had scrolled just a little further?
If anything will wake you up, read or watch something by Jerry Mander. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television is life changing. That was written in 1978, well ahead of its time.
> “[T]he problem was too much information. The population was being inundated with conflicting versions of increasingly complex events. People were giving up on understanding anything. The glut of information was dulling awareness, not aiding it. Overload. It encouraged passivity, not involvement.”
> “The program is only the excuse to get you to watch the advertising. Without the ads there would be no programs. Advertising is the true content of television and if it does not remain so, then advertisers will cease to support the medium, and television will cease to exist as the popular entertainment it presently is.”
Which still doesn’t change that most of the public didn’t know about it. It makes it look conspiratorial. Could they have not made it more known? “Hey we’re implementing a law that’s gonna concentrate power!!!!!”
Perhaps it’s time we use these fancy phones and replace Washington DC and instead we all vote on everything?
I don’t want to negate what this person is saying, but from an objective perspective, is this the most diverse source of news we’ve had in human history? I mean 50 years ago it was just the big three right? ABC, CBS, NBC. Maybe the New York Times and the local paper on top of that? And as another person commented this article doesn’t include social media.
50 years ago (1972) there were thousands of magazines, newspapers, and radio stations in the US -- the vast majority of which were independently owned and operated. Today the number of newspapers is down 10X what they were then, and independent newspapers are down 10X more (~1/100). The number of magazines is down 5X. If you've noticed, even the best among them are really struggling for ad dollars. (Both the Economist magazine and The NewYorker now cost $9/issue, for a WEEKLY.)
Perhaps worse is the loss of staff journalists -- the folks who give each periodical its personality and continuity. The majority of print journalists today are independent/stringers, with little prospect of sustaining that career. Outside of Oligarch-Six media, the rest of print media are struggling to survive. Hiring persistent staff has become simply unaffordable.
For example, every one of the automotive journalists I've followed for decades have all 'retired' in the past few years. Alas, just about all print journalism not owned by a megacorporation is dead or dying today.
In broadcast television maybe. But most of the larger markets were served by multiple competing daily papers. Those have largely disappeared or are under common ownership and limping along as branded outlets of a few conglomerates.
Well, there was also radio news. You could get news from around the world (mostly Europe) on shortwave. Not sure how common that was, but I do know my family and many immigrants in those generations did that.
I still agree that overall there are more choices today. Just saying it wasn't that limited in the past.
I would reconsider your use of the word "objective" because your comment sounds like an entirely subjective (and anecdotal, and presumptive) perspective on this issue.
My use of the term objective was to try and describe the numbers and not the substance of what they were saying. I guess I could have said from a quantitative perspective vs a qualitative perspective? I wasn't alive 50 years ago, so I can't really be subjective.
Reminds me of this viral video of different US media outlets saying the exact same thing. It made me think whether the claim that US intelligence agencies placing an insider was true or not.
And in Canada it's BCE, Corus, Shaw and the CBC that decide what's broadcast and on cable.
As others have rightly pointed out, we have unprecedented access to other services via the internet. However, Canadians are poised to lose some of that access thanks to Bill C-11; a bill fought hard for by the Canadian media cartel lobbyists.
The Telecom tradition in Canada is uniquely Canadian, and I think it doesn't compare particularly well with any other Commonwealth state or former British colony.
That said, the future for Canadian access to international content online is murky.
One thing I found really disappointing about this article was the complete lack of discussion about the economic drivers of this consolidation. You know what happened to the news stations and newspapers that didn't merge to become behemoths? They generally just went out of business because they weren't able to make money. This consolidation doesn't happen through some massive conspiracy, it happens because it's way more economical to have 1 team of researchers and journalist produce content for every small news station rather than having tonnes of independent teams. You can say that's bad, but it's the reality that advertising revenue on local television stations won't fund high quality local journalism. So you can regulate that no company can dominate that market, but what you will end up with is no local news stations at all.
It's also a bit weak to say "Well atleast I know who funds Russia Today", do you want to know who funds CNN? It's a publicly listed company, it's on the stock market. It's not like there's some shadowy owner. In some cases there actually are shadowy owners and we really should be more critical of those situations - the British Newspaper business for example - Metro, owned by Rothermere, Mail - Rothermere, Evening Standard- Lebedev, Telegraph - Barclays. And those owners do have direct private conversations with politicians to wield political power.
But it all comes down to - what is the business model for a large, diverse news eco-system? Because as far as I can see at the moment the consolidation has been driven by economic factors, and so that's how you have to reverse it (if you can).
The rise in media consolidation also coincides with the dropping public trust in mainstream news media. If my memory is correct, the blame falls squarely on the Clinton / Gingrich era politicians, especially those two names, for allowing this to happen. This is on them.
Today, Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Sony, Fox, and Paramount Global control 90% of what you watch, read, or listen to. These companies spend millions on lobbying each year to sway legislation in their favor.
I was not aware Disney and Comcast made books. Was not aware that no one uses Facebook. This article is just..wrong. Few people rely on those sources for information. they are mostly for entertainment. Even for the news, most people get their news online like Twitter or Facebook.
I agree with what you're saying. The title is an stretch. However, the "Big 5" book publishers own 60% of the market in the US. Two of them are subsidiaries of the six companies listed in the article, so I wouldn't underestimate the reach of the six media companies.
I feel this is a completely wrong list. I think that platform providers, whether social media or operating systems, now control access to the users: Google, Meta, Twitter, Apple and Microsoft, for the English-speaking readers. Totally different list for the Chinese-speaking readers.
The ambiguous word "control" is the slippery part in this argument.
Those six companies are probably somewhere in the chain of events that brings most news to my eyes. But that's mostly not in a way you'd normally call "controlling what I read, watch, and hear"
I didn't read the story but from the comments it is actually about the decline in local news.
IMO, the decline in local news started when the local channels started sending local reporters to cover national news stories: a hurricane in FL, a shooting in Boston, or whatever. Those stories are already covered on national news; why would I want to hear about them when watching local news?
Oh, well that's an easy problem to fix, seek out misinformation and you'll get to the bottom of things. And...yeah they collude, you think what? You think there's votes for the Oscars? Like they print ballots, and people go to a get-together with little little foods, and sparkling wine, then they say OK these are the rules, nobody gets to look to the sides at the other votes, it's all secret, then they say some other rules, and one about harassment...then they have pens, right? Or you can use a pencil and erase if you change your mind, but they're not sure if that's good for the integrity...I don't know I guess maybe there's some winks and nudges, just like on this site there's precautions on voting rings, but there's some people beating the system...there's a whole game of cat and mouse, and...OK you know it's just horse trading, there's no merit. Like Oh you want feel-good-movie-of-the-year status to stamp on your blue-ray? There doesn't have to be only one, there's been three some years, it's not the Olympic gold. But you gotta give me best actor, it's key, without that I we can't arrange with Paramount, and you know you owe them, you know you owe them, that they swap best picture for what I want, and you know what that is. Making it up, but how else can it go, you think the foreign press (what are those, foreign correspondents, these days really? Foreign newspapers pay to have correspondents in USA instead of getting it from a blog?) like start little revolutions? Like the State Department, they'll do revolutions in LA to shake up the movie industry and help the good movies win, like...
Like what do you expect, how many players do you expect in the information market? You know what I do, this is my idea, just pay taxes, shut up and pay taxes, because then the state has its own local news sources, lots of them, like police gazettes those are a good one, and like different government agencies have blogs, hey they don't have the funding for this...yet, but they could buy some spectrum and reach more people through talk radio. Government sources have helped me, for real in real life, in startups, like by looking up authoritative information in Japanese, this was a trade office, or by finding out what type of seeds can be imported for wasabi seedlings, without cookies or spam, upselling, emails about how their terms of service are changing clearly just want to be fresh in our thoughts when a buying decision comes up, or like meaningless database updates, like I wouldn't read Heroku database updates if they told me my great-grandmother was a vegetable attached to that database, by all means pull the plug. When the government does something, I guess it has to be a benevolent government, that hasn't come up for me yet, but after forgiving their flaws...they forgive yours. Tons of the time they can't do anything for you, but they tell you, companies never say "no we can't help you in the least, stop trying," they always want you to bite some lure. Like which are the really idealistic companies...Mullvad...Apple so-so, they live for their market cap so now Apple stuff rots pretty quickly...so just those two, they let you access sources from far away, sometimes only locally available geofenced stuff.
But the biggest thing to do to get news from more different sources is learn to read new languages. That's when you really get more sources...Google translate helps too. On top of that? Decide who your country's worst enemy is and go read their propaganda. Always has gems you can easily verify, that your country tried burying.
It's not the same in the Netherlands, these companies are not big there.
However, we do have a similar problem: Almost all the news outlets are controlled by two mega corporations, DPG (De Persgroep) and Mediahuis. Both aren't even Dutch but Belgian! Only the state media (NOS) is still independent.
I'm willing to bet literally every capitalist country has this problem. The incentive to monetize the audience of a news base is too high for these news agencies to turn down, and once one company starts doing this stuff, they become at such an advantage financially they capture the market from any of the other companies not participating in such lucrative practices. It's a race to the bottom because there is no regulation otherwise.
>"Americans spend an average of 12 and a half hours per day consuming media"
Somebody has a problem with basic math. If person works 8 hours and sleeps another 8 there is only 8 hours left. Assuming said person spends their free time doing nothing but "consuming media"
What fraction of the day do you spend away from a networked electronic device of some kind? For me, it's not much. Even while I'm at work or reading a paper book, I usually listen to streamed music. Generally, I unplug only when I sleep.
I'd rather have companies control that than governments, which is all about mass control, power and citizen slavery. My current government, along with our autocrat president, is one good example of this (Spain)
>I'd rather have companies control that than governments, which is all about mass control, power and citizen slavery. My current government, along with our autocrat president, is one good example of this (Spain)
Well I have to tell you... the government is fully involved in censorship on those platforms. Especially spain.
Have the lay people really ever had a clear idea of what is true or happening? Information about the world has always ever been feed from the oligarchy down. People think the internet age shook that but here we are, some of the largest companies on the stock market are these internet companies controlled by the billionaire class.
Of course mine are the good ones, but when looking around I see an awful lot of shitty podcasts. Conclusion? I dunno, the grass doesn't look that much greener outside of those six.
IMO I find a lot of podcasts just slog the current mainstream narratives anyhow. They are full of the same dark patterns too attempting to monetize their userbase using the same techniques as the talking heads on cable news.
I never said he was't I'm referring to how people view a topic that is demonstrably true regardless of the source.
Make enough predictions and yes, eventually you get it right but it doesn't change reality.
I don't see why that's automatically bad. Most of the "news" we consume is a sort of baseline of current events that doesn't require deep thought and is more about volume. It makes sense that this would be consolidated. It's the remaining 10% where there can be interesting nuance and opinion. Even very differently aligned news sources agree on most stuff.
Related, I get a local paper from the small town where I grew up. It represents a tiny fraction of what I read in a week, and it doesn't cover e.g. the war in Ukraine, but its that sort of thing that actually contributes to how I might experience the news differently from someone else
If you read major news networks like Fox or CNN, they have an obvious agenda, but at least they have some conflicting, if often ridiculous, views on stuff. Come to Canada if you want to see homogeneous media.
There is an outsized influence of elitist publications that normal people don't read, like NYT (is it owneed by someone in the six?), The Atlantic and similar stuff, Twitter, probably more. This is relevant because it helps set the agenda of the ruling class, so even if it's a smaller proportion, it gets an outsized influence in policy, righthink, and what trickles down to the progressive media. There may be an equivalent on the right but I don't know it. There are of course some major narratives that get pushed to rile up the right wing base as well that come from somewhere.
People on HN appear more interested in questioning the premise of the article than discussing centralization in the media
Mainstream outlets will often cite time constraints as an excuse for why they’re failing to tackle crucial stories. But is it possible that maybe their silence is by design? After all, in 2021, they apparently had ample time to report on the murder investigation for a travel blogger, gossip about Melania Trump, and a maskless Rudy Giuliani leaving a New Year’s Eve party.
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Well, perhaps there is a wide-reaching corporate conspiracy to peddle pablum…
…or pablum is what people actually want to consume. That is what gets clicks and eyeballs. That’s what’s exciting, that’s what’s fun, that’s what is easy to understand. Is, I dunno, the LIBOR scandal vastly more important than that what outfit Melania Trump wore? Sure is! Does anybody really want to sit through an article or show about the subtle manipulation of inter-bank interest rates? Hell no!
I am sorry, there is and has been an abundance of erudite, in-depth reportage out there covering just about anything, and people’s revealed preference is to care a lot about Kanye. I am sure there is some incentivizing to bow to the corporate masters, but the day-to-day decisions in the media are much more about “what’s going to sell to the cheap seats?”
Or neither: pablum is what is profitable, consumer desires be damned. Consumers consume pablum not because it's what they want, but because it's there and is more engaging than the immediate alternatives. Virtually no one makes calls for more outrage porn and limited, biased reporting.
I would not conflate automatic engagement with volitional desire.
>Does anybody really want to sit through an article or show about the subtle manipulation of inter-bank interest rates?
I really enjoy tedious stuff like that at night. I've watched through every single CSB safety investigation video and a lot of OCW courses because of this. Maybe I'm uncommon but I'm certain I'm not alone.
> the Telecommunications Act signed by then-President Bill Clinton in 1996, which 72% of the public didn’t even know about and no one voted on.
Bullshit. It was voted on by the House of Representatives and the Senate. Both of whose members are elected directly by the citizens of the United States. And it was signed into law by the President who was also directly elected.
There is a populist strain of political discourse that loves to point out how "you didn't have a say in this" for just about anything the government has ever done. You can make a better argument regarding administration rule-making, but trying to claim that "no one voted on" an Act of Congress... get real.
Not accurate. US presidents are not elected directly by citizens, they are chosen by electors. Take a moment to grasp how complex is what we think we know about the political system. Would be posible that other people also didn’t know about more nuanced issues like what laws are voted by congress?
Fair enough, the electoral college is a step between the President and the people. But even with the electoral college, you're talking about a huge number of people overriding the will of a slightly larger huge number of people, you're not talking about tyranny.
As to your broader point about how people don't know about the nuanced issues... you are 100% correct, there probably weren't a whole lot of people who understood the details behind this Act when it was passed, and there a probably not a whole lot of people who understand it now.
But if there are issues that matter, and truly do harm us as a society... you write news articles, or blogs, or substacks about it, and you try to convince voters that it is an issue, and you encourage them to write to their congressional rep and senator, and explain why the law is bad. You don't need to pay high-priced lobbyists to do this stuff. Make a good case, and try to get people to do something. If it's really an issue (i.e. if it affects enough people a little bit, or affects a few people a lot), it will get fixed.
This constant harping on how you don't have any say in the government is learned helplessness, and the political apathy it breeds is far worse than any of the problems it purportedly identifies.
Do you have any specific real-life cases where the write-in-by-mail worked out? In my experience, my elected officials beyond the county-level don't care much about slightly murky "little people" issues (such as OPs) unless bad PR threats loom immediately visible.
Obviously I can't speak to your specific county-level issues... I will say, if you can make a case for why something is bad, and you can get some of your neighbors on board with you, you should absolutely go to a county commissioner's meeting (or whatever type of meeting your county has) and make a case. Showing up in person and saying "I'm getting screwed by this thing you're doing" absolutely will make an impact.
The truth value of your narrative is hardly factual either, I think this is yet another topic that everyone can only guess at what is actually going on, as opposed to what is claimed goes on.
In logic and mathematics, a truth value, sometimes called a logical value, is a value indicating the relation of a proposition to truth.
(Much more at the link)
Judging by your about page, you are clearly not a dumb person, and I suspect you are aware of what the term means, yet you call it gibberish. To me, this is fascinating.
I look forward to the next instalment in this Hacker News guidelines compliant conversation.
Why is this repeated everywhere? They’re just fund managers and most of their “money” is in automated index funds investing retail and institutional investors.
B/c when the fund managers buy assets to make the index fund to resell to retail investors, they usually get the same voting rights from their ownership as a normal shareholder, and they don't pass that part on to the retail investors, no?
Correct, Vanguard votes on the underlying assets of an index fund, not individual (or other) investors. You do get to vote if you own shares of individual companies.
It's not so much about that as an individual, but rather, is it good for the market that the managers of these index funds that just pass through ownership of the asset really get such powerful voting rights? To make it even weirder, I believe these funds are sometimes bought by public pension fund managers and the like. So it feels oddly corrupt.
Did you not watch what happened with Twitter? Musk called them on it and decided to start buying -> told he couldn't join the board if he bought more than BlackRock and Vanguard collectively held and they proceeded to buy more than he had individually after that.
These companies manage ETFs, so instead of purchasing shares from 500 companies tracked in S&P 500 (and paying 500x the commission), you can just purchase X shares of the VOO ETF. On paper, it looks like they own everybody else, but in practice they are just proxies.
I think the GP's (heavy-handed) point is that the proxy ownership doesn't extend to voting rights: when you own shares in an ETF, there is no way for you to individually vote based on the underlying constituent stocks.
(This is arguably a bad thing for long term economic health, since broad-market ETFs have a dampening effect on otherwise healthy amounts of speculation. But I think it's a far cry from saying that they "control" the market, since it's a mostly passive effect.)
No google/youtube? No twitter? No facebook? Is this article from the past? Most people do not get their information from the television and so I doubt these six control most of anything.