I do not understand something about these articles. They rightly point out that media is the underlying issue in America, but they focus on the NYT.

Secondly, the idea that "more information" will deal with misinformation, is often made, despite significant evidence that this is not true. Worse, it is Social media, which is being defended here, which has shown us that even showing people labelled misinformation allows it to stick.

What gives?

The article argues that this is because of the agenda setting power of the NYT, which links to a 1972 research paper. I took a dive into that realm of study, and its taken me an hour to get no substantiate answer either way.

As far as I can tell, Fox has far larger reach, and far larger agenda setting power for its audience. Subscriber figures are given below the line.

Secondly, the article lauds the ability of social media to talk fast - in particular communication between experts between Jan and March 2020. And then disapproves of Twitter's handling of the NY Post article, arguing that

> > Twitter’s role with regards to the Hunter Biden story should have been to facilitate more information sharing, in this case to disprove the story, not to arbitrarily decide what was or was not true.

The first argument ignores the amplification of conspiracies that are unique for social media. Here is a study on the transmission of information between conspiracy networks, and expert networks:https://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554

The study says it so :
> These results suggest that news assimilation differs according to the categories. Science news is usually assimilated, i.e., it reaches a higher level of diffusion quickly, and a longer lifetime does not correspond to a higher level of interest. Conversely, conspiracy rumors are assimilated more slowly and show a positive relation between lifetime and size. For both science and conspiracy news, we compute the size as a function of the lifetime and confirm that differentiation in the sharing patterns is content-driven, and that for conspiracy there is a positive relation between size and lifetime

Which seems to be exactly how COVID misinformation behaved online. Despite the ample evidence against it.

That misinformation or confusion, was amplified by a subset of news media channels, with mask wearing becoming a political point.

If you hold the first thesis true, then shouldn't there be a discussion on media agenda setting power? And wouldn't that largely implicate one of the largest news networks in America?

And on an even broader scale - with people arguing about fixing social media (and this article rightly highlights the problem of content on SM, as opposed to the dynamics around content sharing), is the creation of problematic content not simply an issue of creating content that keeps people on the news channel?

As stated here:

>Fox is small-town/suburban and populist. Fox competes directly against hundreds of other cable channels and has established a specialized niche in its media ecology. Fox trades in stories about the venality of big government, liberal overreach and little-guy heroes of the heartland. A large share of Fox stories deftly push emotional buttons (lest the viewer push the buttons on his or her remote…

Maybe I am missing something large, but as a business model, it seems that news media + attention battles result in a bad outcome for everyone. Not just for the NYT or FOX, but for all channels.

In which case, maybe some form of reliable high quality news may be considered a public good, and then funded and protected from interference?

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Media impact, News papers vs Television:

The article says: "research shows that “fake news” makes up a fraction of American’s media diet; ", which links to this research paper: "Evaluating the fake news problem at the scale of the information ecosystem"

The abstract states that-

> First, news consumption of any sort is heavily outweighed by other forms of media consumption, comprising at most 14.2% of Americans’ daily media diets. Second, to the extent that Americans do consume news, it is overwhelmingly from television, which accounts for roughly five times as much as news consumption as online. Third, fake news comprises only 0.15% of Americans’ daily media diet.

So the cable news cycle is in effect, and the Agenda setting power of news media is significant. Which brings us to viewership figures:

Subscriber base:

NYT has 4.3 mn subscribers, as of Q2 2020. This is a relatively dramatic increase, with 3.8 mn subs in Q1, and 2.98 subs in Q2 2019.

Fox news, for prime time, had 3.98 mn viewers in Jun 2020, with its core opinion leaders:

>With an average total audience of 4.8 million viewers, Hannity finished in first place overall, followed by Tucker Carlson Tonight (4.8 million total viewers).
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2020/06/09/hannity-...

CNN in contrast has: 2.5 mn prime time viewers for the same period.

Agenda setting power is not evenly distributed, and both audiences on the America divide behave differently, and are composed differently - creating different issues both groups are interested in.