Media continues to lose influence

David Goldman:

...
... 62% of Americans get at least some of their news via social media according to a Pew Research survey and the proportion is growing fast. Facebook and other social media allow individuals to customize their news consumption on the basis of recommendations and re-posting by friends, and news consumers increasingly depend on their networks rather than the media.

That's how Steve Bannon's Breitbart news organization, with its edgy mix of salacious gossip and right-wing politics, morphed almost overnight into a major media player. That's why the Drudge report got 1.47 billion page views in July. There is no way of knowing what Americans believe. Only one in nine Americans believes that Hillary Clinton is "honest and trustworthy." They don't trust the media's cover-up of her misdeeds, and the cover-up of the cover-up of the cover-up.

Do they believe what the National Enquirer put at the top of its website, namely that Hillary had her "bagman" arrange Lesbian trysts? Do they believe she called Muslims "sand N---ers"? Do they believe that the Clintons are responsible for 46 unsolved homicides? Or do they just believe that Bill and Hillary made $250 million by peddling influence, used a private email server to hide their self-dealing at the State Department, and lied until their faces turned blue when caught?

There's no way to tell what people think. It's impossible for most Americans to form a judgment with which they feel comfortable, because they do not have sources of information they can trust. Fox News is in a civil war between the pro- and anti-Trump Republicans. The other networks are with Hillary. The major media outlets have lost credibility. Only 32% of Americans said they had "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of confidence in the news media in a September Gallup Poll survey. That's the lowest level in history, and should be no surprise: the major media has to spin a new cover-up every couple of days, before it is finished putting the previous set of lies to bed.
...

This sounds about right.  I never watch the network news shows and have quit watching Fox.  I tend to like Facebook better than Twitter.  It allows an editor's judgment to be replaced by crowdsourcing for information that I find interesting.  I still browse a lot of news sites, scanning them for things of interests, but I find a lot to ignore in those scans.