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Comment by norikki | Hacker News Reader

>"Facebook’s takeover of online media looks rather like a slow-motion coup. Before social media, web publishers could draw an audience one of two ways: through a dedicated readership visiting its home page or through search engines. By 2009, this had started to change. Facebook had more than 300 million users, primarily accessing the service through desktop browsers, and publishers soon learned that a widely shared link could produce substantial traffic."

It seems to me that the New York Times is just complaining that they can't control the political narrative anymore because the proles can now decide for themselves what news they will read. Thoughts?

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Realistically speaking, when would you say the NYT last controlled the political narrative? I would argue that it's not a recent loss of control, so implying that this is a case of sour grapes strikes me as unlikely to come close to the truth.

Besides, Facebook is an appalling, festering wound. It's not just politics, but of course a lot of money and talk floats around politics and a lot of noise as a result. Facebook is a case of a minority using the service to keep in touch with some people, and a vast majority engaged in a bizarre and self-destructive series of narcissistic behaviors.

The evidence keeps mounting that using Facebook and unhappiness are strongly correlated, and I keep seeing people who aren't remotely surprised by that.

It can be hard to attribute control, if 100 news organizations all push a narrative and that narrative sticks maybe all 100 of them had some control, maybe one had control and the other 99 were just mindlessly parroting what they said. The last time the NYT's narrative matched up with the generally accepted version of the truth? Probably as recently as the 2012 election, possibly even more recently. Was that control? Certainly looks like it to me but you may disagree and as I said, control is tough to prove. I don't think the parent comment is unlikely to come close to the truth though. It seems to come from pretty reasonable observations.

That's just not even close to being true, for at least half of the country. You're not controlling anything if an order of magnitude more people listen to Rush Limbaugh than read your paper. For a huge section of society, the NYT has been seen as basically untrustworthy or a "liberal shill" since Reagan to be realistic, and Clinton to be charitable.

There's no way an order of magnitude more people listen to Rush Limbaugh than read NYT. There might be more listeners than subscribers. But that's hardly an apples to apples comparison, one is free, the other costs money. Many many more people read NYT articles for free without subscribing.

Well, the NYT has a weekly circulation of about half a million, and Limbaugh gets a weekly audience of 20 million. As to who clicks through a google link to their site? I don't know. I don't think that's anything like "controlling the political narrative" though, and I don't think having a site that people sometimes read is the same as twenty million people listening to you for hours.

The New York Times has at the very least 30% more unique monthly consumers than Limbaugh, and realistically probably 300-400% more given Limbaugh's weekly listener overlap.

* nytimes.com had 72.9 million users and 649.2 million page views in January 2016 [1]

* "Limbaugh still draws some 13 million listeners a week (though that’s down from his 1990s peak of more than 20 million)", per an article from May 2016 [2]

1. http://adage.com/article/media/york-times-pulls-back-ahead-w...

2. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/is-rush-limba...

Of course that averages out to 9 page clicks per user, and Alexa estimates that more than 25% of those clicks are Google referrals. Not exactly the same as millions of people listening to your every word.

Then there's drumdance's excellent point.

Indeed, 13-20 million people listening to a voice in the background while driving to lunch is not exactly the same as 73 million people actively mentally engaged while reading an article.

Even notwithstanding his comparatively miniscule and unengaged audience, Limbaugh's agenda-setting power pales in comparison with The New York Times. The combined audience of The New York Times' editorially-aligned media ecosystem utterly dwarfs that of Limbaugh.

Limbaugh influences Hannity, Beck, Levin, and other conservative talk radio; and, to an extent, cable news like Fox and web media like Breitbart.

The New York Times influences a vastly larger media syndicate: the most listened-to radio organization, NPR; print and web media like The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Atlantic; cable and network news like CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and NBC. And while there are of course other areas of coverage, politics garners the largest share and most prominent placement. The New York Times' highly syndicated political message not only covers the general population, but also percolates through universities, where engagement with it deepens as it intertwines with the academic curriculum.

The vast reach and depth of the latter media apparatus means that The New York Times plays a major role -- and quite likely constitutes the single most influential voice -- in shaping the dominant narrative in American political life.

I see that the Gish Gallop is alive and well, and I'm starting to see what that other article was saying about shills.

The New York Times covers many things: politics, disasters, science, the arts, education and so on.

Rush Limbaugh exists for one reason only: the promotion of a hyper-partisan view of the world. He gets millions of listeners just for that one single topic.

Does every NYT reader read it for the editorials?

> generally accepted version of the truth

Does it exist?

Realistically, before talk radio and before the internet. both diversified the point of view and the later gave way to an incredible number of sources to include the view from elsewhere in the world.

the problem I think is that many inside the beltway don't understand this or want to. look at all the complaints against non traditional media sources being shown preference in the WH. Yes some of it is politically oriented but their real fear is that it cements in the minds of many they the press doesn't is not just certain big papers and television sources, it is anyone who can create an audience and deliver the story.

that is beneficial to all. the more voices the better and less likely the message will be controlled, manipulated, or simply one sided.

>the more voices the better

Remember that the next time you try to hear your own voice in a stadium. It's an old trick to say, "I want to hear what you all have to say... at once." Then smile as people drown each other out...

In 2003, the NYT was crucial in generating public support for the Iraq War. They uncritically reported literal fake news provided to them by the Bush administration, and people who disbelieved them were regarded as cranks.

So, depends on what you consider recent.

> decide for themselves

That's in interesting interpretation of what goes on to determine what Facebook shows to users.

Worse, it adapts to interactions.. so if you lean one way, you tend to mostly see one way... same the other way. There is some weird influence from FB news, or so it would seem. But mostly it's confirmation alignment... It's weird what some friends see, vs what I see in our respective feeds.

I have an eclectic combination of very conservative, liberal, statist, centrist and libertarian friends. So I see it all over the map. Other friends don't.

No – the article wouldn't make any sense if it were some other newspaper taking the NYT's market share, even thought the loss of power for the NYT were the same.

This isn't some selfish ploy to protect power by the NYT. Maybe their view of the importance of journalism is tainted by being the subject as well, but there are any number of non-journalists agreeing with the idea.

The political culture has significantly changed over last twenty years, and the changes in the media landscape are one of very few causal mechanisms that have been proposed (neo-capitalism destroying the middle class being among the others).

Looking at these changes, it's really hard to argue that the media of the past (or, actually, present) failed the people – at least in comparison to whatever instagram feed is supposed to replace it.I'm hoping there'll be a few powerful institutions left when the slaughter is over, but they all disappear, today's democratic societies will devolve into some bizarre pre-democratic dystopias.

> It seems to me that the New York Times is just complaining that they can't control the political narrative anymore because the proles can now decide for themselves what news they will read. Thoughts?

Lets assume that NYT is indeed complaining. How does this make it ok for Facebook to control? This is a classic ad hominem fallacy.

Not exactly, they're complaining that ANOTHER company is controlling access and therefore the financial gains associated to the news industry. It was never a battle simply about ideas, but about the profits behind the news-producing machine.

> because the proles can now decide for themselves what news they will read.

Except that Facebook is very much like minitrue, a large machine with people as its cogs that outputs information that may or may not be correlated with facts. Not to mention that it's also targeted at each prole, so the proles always get an echo chamber that will quell the rebellion.

The 1984 analogies go both ways.

> the proles can now decide for themselves

the facebook algorithms are a black box

Well, there have always been different sources of media contending for the narrative. My grandpa used to read both the Washington Times, which he saw as basically true news; he also read the Washington Post (affectionately: "the com-Post") because he wanted to keep an eye on the other team's plans.

What is novel here is that there are now random teenagers in Macedonia just totally making stuff up, and this is competing for reader attention with the same amount of weight as all the other stuff which we traditionally called "news" (https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/).

As recently as 2009 it seemed totally crazy that, like, teenagers on the Internet could just make stuff up and it would affect world affairs -- see https://xkcd.com/635/ , Randall Munroe's September 2009 mockery of the Orson Scott Card "Ender's Game" future where blogger kids make stuff up to change national discourse.

Munroe was wrong, Card was right (?!), and it totally happened. The 2016 US elections went to /b/, /pol/, and /int/ -- congrats, folks! Interesting times.

The "old media" people who bewail this stuff may be complaining that they're losing influence, yes, but some of them actually believed the story that they were doing a public service, and those people are upset about something else, too.

A friend who spent some time in the old media told me that what worries them about this shift is that people are "no longer following a single newsgathering organization they can hold accountable" and instead use "contextless random shares via their Facebook feed (which produce a sort of race to the bottom)". He added that "the passive nature of the Facebook News Feed is one of many forces causing people to take less responsibility for their information intake and lose information literacy skills. I guess that's probably bad."

Those are reasonable things to be worried about whether you favor the Washington Times or the Washington Post or Breitbart or the Huffington Post or Coast to Coast AM.

And how the hell do you "hold accountable" a traditional old media? They are big powerful conglomerates that are only really accountable to the politicians that pay their salaries, the few cents you give them by buying the paper is a drop in the ocean. At least with FaceBook you're on a level playing field with everyone else that's posting shit, and there are a LOT of people posting, so you have more freedom to pick your sources based on their objective truth or any other metric you care about. And if you don't want to hear the truth, you won't be reading the Washington Whatsit, you'll be reading the Daily Mail in the first place.

Typically the way that you would "hold accountable" the traditional old media is by ignoring sources that prove bad.

If you think the Washington Post is publishing bad, pointless nonsense news, you stop reading it. Cancel your subscription. Don't buy a copy at a newsstand. Don't buy ads for your local business. Don't place classified ads (remember those?). Tune it out.

Subscriber count will drop. The rate card will list a lower readership and ad rates will go down. The newspaper will lose revenue. It will lay off staff and implode.

"Traditional old news" was all published together in a big bundle of paper and if it was bad quality stuff you would stop reading the whole thing. That was how you held it accountable -- you stopped paying attention to junk.

This has certainly happened -- remember News of the World? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_of_the_World) Certainly everyone in Liverpool remembers The Sun. Traditionally, newspapers which did bad journalism and just printed crap shaped up or they closed down.

With the advent of Facebook News Feed driven news it's harder to punish a bad source. A typical News Feed post shows me, in order, (1) the name of the friend who shared it (2) some text they wrote about it (3) a photo (4) the headline (5) some text from the article and finally (6) the actual source of the news. I have to deliberately choose to ignore or distrust stuff based on the source -- and that's after I have read the material. I had no choice in terms of, not even picking up a newspaper in the first place.

In the 2000s it was easy for me not to read the Epoch Times (the Falun Gong newspaper printed in the New York area and distributed throughout the US) and when I did read articles in it I knew that I was reading something printed by a Falun Gong mouthpiece organization. In the 2010s it is hard for me not to see videos made by Russia Today (a fascinating, viral news organization with a heavy Web presence); it's pretty common for me to see rt.com content in my various social news feeds and I incur a bunch of extra cognitive load to remember the biases that that newsgathering organization brings to the table.

The proles only think they are deciding. Things were tolerable when media outlets controlled access. Thier bias was open for all who cared to challenge. Now control is in the hands of facebook's robot. Bias is now hidden behind math, code and interface. There is nobody to challenge or attack. Instead of calling out NYT we must now fight smoke.

> Facebook’s takeover of online media looks rather like a slow-motion coup.

... complains the former king.

When was the last time the NYT was the king of anything? Rush Limbaugh and his type have been dominating for a couple of decades now.

Do people still listen to Limbaugh? He's on in the middle of the day in any market I've ever been in so he was never even competing for either of the drive times for me. I moved completely to podcasts a few years ago anyway.

He has about twenty million weekly listeners.

He actually has about 13 million weekly listeners.

The weekly audience of The New York Times is likely 3-4x larger. Details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13911658.

In the blue collar world, it's not unreasonable that people have the radio on while they work.

Google seems to somehow avoid criticism for doing the same crap other companies do. They have had horrible problems with Sexual Harassment, just as bad and toxic as Uber, but the narrative is not there, just stop and think about that for a second.

you're implying the NYT has ever been the king of online media

Only unintentionally. I meant that they were king of print, and have been completely usurped by a new mechanism for controlling content consumption by users.

I don't buy for a moment that Facebook users are choosing a lot of the content they see.

> king of print

The Wall Street Journal has had a larger national subscription base for years.

And of course there were many dominant local city papers in the days before digital. I used to read the Chicago Tribune cover to cover every day. Before that I read the Atlanta Journal.

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