[ExI] Facebook Whistleblower's New 60 Minutes Interview

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] Facebook Whistleblower's New 60 Minutes Interview

 

>…Social media…Now you are asking these media to be arbiters of what's ethical or moral or dangerous or true.   I think that may be more dangerous than what idiots say...   bill w

 

BillW, these media are not even so much arbiters, but rather the most successful ones are the ones which are society’s mirror.

 

Consider the three US news majors: FoxNews, MSNBC and CNN.  Their viewership, and by extension the value of their ad space, is measured by Nielsen meters.  I and my family used to carry those for a coupla years, but we don’t have TV so they seldom got any signal from us.  That too is valuable information for advertisers, but really what they want to know is the prime time prime audience, the 25 to 49 demographic which spends the most.  In all of prime time FoxNews crushes its rivals, with more market share than the other majors combined.

 

So… consider the content on Fox: lots of crime stories, UFO stuff, and so forth.  For the past coupla weeks, they have been running as the lede story a young couple on a cross-country road trip, got in a fight, she was found dead, manhunt for him.  Scarcely newsworthy, ja?  On the contrary, newsworthy indeed, which is why it is the lede there: FoxNews prints what sells.  Their Nielsen reports suggest road-trip girl sells like hotcakes, and their internet clicks and duration data confirm this.  The UFO stories sell.  The anti-vax stuff sells.  Their content beats the competitors combined.  So… they run it.  FoxNews has no political opinion, they are about making money.  And they are succeeding.

 

Our news agencies are a mirror of who we are.  We don’t always like what we see, but there it is.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

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