It looks like a miracle considering where Americans get their information –

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Uh, oh.

It’s been one week since Election Day, and it appears Republicans are on the verge of winning the 218 seats they need in the House to take majority control in the 118th Congress next January.

The official results being reported in The New York Times show that in called races, Republicans lead in 217, and Democrats are still stuck at 204.

The Washington Post, on the other hand, is only reporting 215 seats for Republicans, and 205 for the Democrats, as of press time for this publication.

Votes are still being counting in a number of states, however, especially on the West coast, and the mail and drop off ballots still being counted tend to favor Democrats. Some of the races are still very close and could turn on just a few votes.

“After rosy predictions for a Republican (red) wave, the party’s majority in the House will be much smaller than G.O. P. leaders had anticipated,” the Times reports. “Congress will be divided next year, after Democrats held control of the Senate. Attention will now be focused on a few districts in California and Colorado where the Republican candidate is leading in the vote count. A race call in any of these districts on Tuesday would almost certainly give Republicans the 218 seats needed to retake the House majority.”

While midterm votes are still being counted, former President Donald J. Trump is expected to announce his 2024 presidential bid on Tuesday, the Times reports, “his third campaign for the office.”

“A growing number of Republicans, however, see him as a political liability given the party’s electoral showing in the midterm elections.”

Arizona Governor’s Race

In one bit of good news for Democrats, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, was declared the winner in Arizona’s bitterly contested and extremely close race for governor.

Her Republican rival, Kari Lake, a Trump right-winger, had not yet conceded at press time.

Hobbs, as Arizona’s secretary of state, stood up to efforts by Trump allies to overturn the 2020 election, and voters turned out to support that, a surprise to all the pollsters, pundits and Republicans who were sure there would be a Red Wave last Tuesday based on President Joe Biden’s approval rating below 50 percent and historical precedent in midterm elections.

Where Americans Get Information

Meanwhile, it seems like almost a miracle that enough Americans got enough information to even know to vote for Democrats, considering the chaotic state of the current information system, the chaotic situation dominated by social media and what’s left of the media and press in the United States.

If Americans really wanted to keep this democracy going, half the people would not be paying attention to Fox News, Breitbart News or anything being said by the most corrupt president in American history by far, Donald Trump.

His continuing popularity proves what Abraham Lincoln once said, back when there were only newspapers and word of mouth for people to turn to for news and information.

“If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Trump proved you can fool half the people most of the time, with the help of media channels hell bent on turning this democracy into a fascist, capitalist state where the federal government has no power at all. They seem to want corporations like the big oil companies, power companies, insurance companies and Big Pharma to control everything — with no regulations at all. They also seem to want no social safety net for the poor. They want dog-eat-dog run amok corporate capitalism, or social Darwinism, the survival of the fittest.

If you are curious and want to know where Americans get their information, Havard publishes a media ownership index, but it does not include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or TikTok, and it is not exactly kept up to date by the minute. It is a good snapshot to see what ballpark we are playing in, however.

U.S. Media Ownership

Here are a few key, relevant highlights.

Wikipedia, which is funded some by Google and Youtube (which is also owned by Google), has the largest audience out there, with 1.7 billion unique visitors every month. It is reportedly a key source for the new Trump Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, in spite of criticism in the past for being written and edited by amateurs, not peer reviewed academics.

It is followed by Fox, which has 833 million visitors a month, and reaches 3.6 million households on average for weekday prime time news.

The New York Times, by contrast, gets 89.75 million monthly unique visitors, and has over 6 million paid subscribers.

The Wall Street Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch who also owns Fox News, has 2 million digital subscribers, and reaches 54.1 million visitors per month.

The PBS News Hour, the most boring news show on television, still claims to reach 2.7 million viewers a night, even though by the time they report it, it is old news. The audience is mostly very old and poor, and seen by the people left who still get their news from a broadcast antenna and can’t afford cable or live in rural areas where cable is not available.

Sinclair Broadcasting, a right wing, for profit equivalent, reaches 2.5 million prime time viewers, and 75 million unique visitors per month on the web.

Politico, launched in 2007 by Robert Allbritton and now owned by a German media mogul, claims to get 26 million unique visitor visits per month.

The Drudge Report, a conservative html news links site that was big early on in the development of the internet (remember Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky?), still claims 20 million monthly visitors.

The Dallas Morning News, by contrast, a mass circulation daily newspaper I used to write for out of New Orleans, still claims to get 19.86 million visitors a month.

Breitbart’s monthly traffic bottomed out at 4.6 million unique visitors in May 2019, down from 17.3 million at the start of 2017, according to Comscore, a digital tracking firm.

C-SPAN gets about 4.9 million visitors and viewers a month.

ProPublica, a non-profit investigative news site — which we publish on the New American Journal from time to time — has 350,000 newsletter subscribers, and gets 4 million hits per month.

The Arkansas Press Gazette, for comparison’s sake, gets 1.55 million monthly visits on average.

The New American Journal, a news website started by Glynn Wilson in 2014, reached 2.1 million hits a month in March 2020, while covering Spring Break in Pensacola the month the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States.

Advertising Data

Social Media Users

Facebook, on the other hand, reached 2.9 billion monthly average users, according to a Google search, although it seems to have plateaued and begun to drop finally in recent months.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, gets about 2.2 billion users a month.

Twitter has about 450 million monthly active users, although that may drop after being taken over by Elon Musk as people say they are dropping their accounts.

Should We Trust Facebook?

If Americans are going to spend so much time using Facebook for news, information and entertainment, shouldn’t they know whether the company now called Meta can be trusted?

The publication Nieman Lab from Harvard University’s Neiman Fellowship program just ran a story about this.

You may have heard that Facebook announced the layoff of 11,000 employees, 13 percent of its work force, after the value of the company dropped by a half a trillion dollars in the stock market.

Among the mass layoffs at the company formerly known as Facebook last week are several roles that have served as a bridge between the news industry and the sprawling tech company, according to Harvard.

The Meta Journalism Project Accelerator’s David Grant, a program manager, and Dorrine Mendoza, who led local news partnerships for the platform, were both laid off. Other journalism-adjacent positions eliminated include the head of news partnerships for South East Asia, a program manager for news, two program managers for news integrity, and multiple news communications jobs.

Meta declined to comment on the layoffs or confirm how many of the 11,000 positions eliminated were jobs relating to the news business. It’s unclear what impact the job losses will have on all of Facebook’s various news-related efforts, including the Meta Journalism Project itself. (Meta spokespeople and Campbell Brown, Meta’s vice president of global media partnerships, did not respond to requests for comment on the future of the Meta Journalism Project.)

Read the full story here, and consider whether you think Facebook deserves your trust.

Meta’s layoffs make it official: Facebook is ready to part ways with the news

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