Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

The consumption habits of people proof this statement wrong. Tabloid newspapers have higher circulation than anything else. In some countries a majority of people receive their news from facebook or other social media feeds. Television channels like fox news draw more viewers than cspan.

The mainstream media is not that mainstream at all. The principle of 'the big lie' still works very well.

View on HN

When your audience is affluent and powerful, you don't need as many to have an oversized impact. It's not like NYT has a small readership. They are massive and their influence is far greater than that of The Enquirer.

Affluent and powerful people are typically people that are smart enough to parse out any mild bias and ignore it. The Gomer and Cletus crowds of the world that vote are the people that are the risk for the lies of the fake news sources because they vote and are a very large group.

In a democracy the affluent and powerful have as many votes as anybody else. If the NYT only manages to reach a upper class clientele who already agree with the NYT they are not very powerful at all. (as we have seen during the last election, if the NYT et al were that powerful we would have seen a different outcome)

Tabloids and fake news rags on the other hand have been reaching far into the middle class, the non-voters and so forth, in other words they're generating an audience among people who we would have considered to be immune to demagoguery.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com