PEW, the respected statistical resource, “published” their 2015 report on the state of the news media. It’s a very comprehensive report, with many many pages of data, in linked documents and “fact sheets”. The headline this year is about mobile use for news, with mobile having more traffic than desktop computers, but shorter time spent at sites.
Call it a mobile majority. At the start of 2015, 39 of the top 50 digital news websites have more traffic to their sites and associated applications coming from mobile devices than from desktop computers, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of comScore data.
In tandem with the growth of mobile has been the further rise of the social Web, where the flow of information embodies a whole new dynamic. Some of our 2014 research revealed that nearly half of Web-using adults report getting news about politics and government in the past week on Facebook, a platform where influence is driven to a strong degree by friends and algorithms.
Nearly half get their news about politics and government on Facebook?
One might presume those people are only “seeing” and “reading” about the world through very specific filters corresponding to their personal preconceptions of the world. Such a perspective of preselected access and emphasis was in the past called propaganda.
For all the problems with mass media, the lack of a common factual basis for “what is going on” creates a whole new set of problems, as has been remarked upon and predicted by media pundits for a number of years now. We don’t have Walter Cronkite telling the mass of Americans “and that’s the way it is” anymore.