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.
That content is mediated by Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.
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.
I don't see what context this adds.
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.
Getting soooo tired of users modifying headlines to promote their agenda.
The HN title should at least be representative of the content.
The George Floyd story, maybe the story of the decade revolved around footage taken with a smartphone camera.
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.
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.
Google is the 'camera'.
They can ostensibly focus it anywhere with predictable results.
If I wanted power, I'd rather be Google than the NYT.
- The news is informed by the content on the platforms
The platforms control the information and they control what people see as the "news".
Because of this some countries even wanted to impose a facebook tax. Like Australia.
FB tried to be purely a platform but society has asked them to "annotate" fake news or propaganda. So FB is now playing an editorial role.
However we got here, it's not a great place to be in. We have massive networks that we cannot escape which are actively firewalling information.
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.
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.
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.
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?