Media

From Gutenberg's printing press to TikTok, every new form of media has followed the same arc. It frees people, then it gets captured, then it gets monetised. This is the story of how the loudest, angriest and most dishonest voices ended up with the biggest megaphones, and who collected the data while it happened 

Transcript

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Media When I was growing up, the media was simple. You had the newspapers and you had the news on tell. The nine o'clock news or the ten o'clock news, depending on the channel, that was your window into the world. On a Sunday there was always a news of the world kicking around somewhere, usually with some scoop about a politician or a celebrity being caught doing something embarrassing. My dad would read it cover to cover. Nobody questioned it much. The newspaper told you what had happened, the newsreader on the tele confirmed it, and that was that. You trusted it because there wasn't really an alternative. It was the only version of reality you were offered, so you accepted it. But the media didn't start with newspapers, and it didn't start with television. Humans have been trying to record and share information for as long as we've existed. The earliest form of mass communication was probably cave paintings, tens of thousands of years old, essentially instruction manuals showing other humans what was safe to eat and what wasn't. By the 1400s, Italian merchants were compiling handwritten newsletters and circulating them to their business contacts, spreading news of trade, politics and war across Europe. Then in 1440, a German goldsmith called Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press and changed everything. Gutenberg's press didn't just make books cheaper to produce, it broke the monopoly on information. Before the press, knowledge was controlled by the church and the state, hand-copied manuscripts were expensive and rare, and most people had no access to written material at all. The printing press put information into the hands of ordinary people for the first time, and within decades it had helped fuel the Protestant Reformation and the European Renaissance. Martin Luther's ideas only spread because they could be printed and distributed faster than the Church could suppress them. It is no exaggeration to say that the printing press was the most disruptive technology in human history until the Internet. The first newspapers appeared in Europe around 1609, with the first English language newspaper arriving in 1620. By the 1830s, the penny press had emerged, cheap newspapers aimed at the masses rather than the wealthy, built on sensationalism, scandal, and murder stories. They were the forerunners of the tabloids. By 1900, newspapers had become powerful institutions in their own right, with major owners using them to push political agendas and shape public opinion. Then came radio in the 1920s, and for the first time in history, huge numbers of people could hear the same event at the same time. This was transformative. During the Second World War, radio became the primary way people followed the conflict, with reporters broadcasting live from the front lines. Edward R. Murrow's live reports from London during the Blitz are still considered some of the finest journalism ever produced. Radio also gave politicians a direct line to the public, bypassing the newspapers entirely. Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats brought the president's voice into American living rooms and fundamentally changed the relationship between government and citizens. Television arrived in the late 1940s and by the 1950s and 60s it was the dominant form of mass media. In America, three networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, controlled over 90% of what people watched. On some nights, close to half the nation was watching the same program. Television had an extraordinary power to unify, but also to shape. The Vietnam War was the first televised conflict, and nightly footage of the reality of combat helped turn public opinion against the war in a way that newspapers alone could never have achieved. People saw the horror with their own eyes, and it changed everything. Up to this point, for all its flaws, mainstream media operated under a broadly shared set of principles. News organizations were expected to at least attempt impartiality. Journalists were supposed to verify their sources. There was a line, however blurry, between news and opinion. The system wasn't perfect and bias existed, but there was a general understanding that the news was supposed to tell you what happened, not what to think about it. That understanding started to fracture in the 1990s, and the man most responsible for breaking it was Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch had been building a media empire since the 1950s, starting with newspapers in Australia and expanding into Britain and America. He bought The Sun, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, and built the Sky Television Network. But his most consequential move came in 1996 when he launched Fox News in the United States. To run it, he hired Roger Ailes, a former Republican political strategist who had worked on the campaigns of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. Ailes didn't come from journalism, he came from politics, and the network he built wasn't a news operation that happened to lean conservative. It was, as one media scholar put it, a political operation that masks itself as a news channel. Ailes had conceived the idea years earlier during his time in the Nixon White House, where he wrote a memo called A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News. The plan was simple. Create a network that looked and felt like news but functioned as a vehicle for conservative messaging, bypassing what Ailes and Murdoch both regarded as a liberal mainstream media. They branded it fair and balanced, which was clever because the slogan itself was the argument. It positioned Fox as the counterweight to an alleged liberal bias in every other news organization, which gave them permission to be openly partisan while claiming they were simply restoring balance. The impact was enormous. Fox News became the most watched cable news channel in America and the main profit engine of Murdoch's empire. It helped elect George W. Bush, gave a platform to the Tea Party movement, provided Donald Trump with essentially unlimited positive coverage, and reshaped the entire American media landscape. Other networks tried to copy the model. MSNBC pivoted to the left. CNN tried to occupy the middle. The result was a media ecosystem built entirely around partisan identity, where people chose their news based on which version of reality confirmed what they already believed. Trust in the media collapsed. A University of Georgia professor who studies this said of Ailes, No single individual has done more harm to American democracy in the last generation. He ushered in the Post-Trety. Ailes was forced to resign in 2016 amid allegations of sexual harassment and died the following year. In 2023, Fox News paid$787.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems after the network had broadcast false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. During the proceedings, Murdoch acknowledged under oath that some Fox News hosts had endorsed claims he knew to be false. The network that built its brand on being the truth tellers paid over three-quarters of a billion dollars because it got caught lying. And then came the internet, and with it a transformation so fast and so total that we're still trying to understand what it's done to us. The World Wide Web was invented in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN. Within a decade it had fundamentally changed how humans access information. For the first time, anyone with a connection could publish, share and consume content without needing to own a printing press, a broadcast license, or a distribution network. It was in principle the most democratizing technology since Gutenberg. And like the printing press before it, the initial explosion of access was extraordinary. People could read newspapers from other countries, access academic research, watch footage the mainstream media wouldn't air, and communicate with strangers on the other side of the world. The gatekeepers had been bypassed. Then social media arrived and the gatekeepers came back wearing different clothes. Facebook launched in 2004 and within a few years it had become the primary way billions of people consumed news, communicated with each other, and understood the world. But Facebook wasn't a news organization. It was an advertising company. Its entire business model was built on keeping people on the platform for as long as possible so they could be shown more adverts. The way it did this was through an algorithm, a set of instructions that decided what each user saw in their feed. And the algorithm didn't prioritize accuracy or importance or truth. It prioritised engagement. Content that generated the most reactions, the most comments, the most shares got pushed to more people, and it turns out that the content that generates the most engagement is the content that makes people angry, afraid, or outraged. In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed just how far this had gone. A political consulting firm had harvested the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users without their consent through a personality quiz app. The data was used to build psychological profiles of voters and target them with tailored political messaging during both the Trump campaign and the Brexit referendum. Facebook had known about the data harvesting since 2015, demanded it be deleted, and was told it had been. It hadn't. When the story broke, over$100 billion was wiped off Facebook's market value and Mark Zuckerberg was hauled before Congress to explain himself. Facebook was eventually fined$5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission and paid$725 million to settle a class action lawsuit. Cambridge Analytica went bankrupt. Nobody went to prison. Then in 2021, a former Facebook data scientist named Frances Haugen walked out of the company with tens of thousands of pages of internal documents and blew the whistle on what she'd seen. Her testimony before the US Senate was devastating. She revealed that Facebook's own internal research showed that Instagram was harming the mental health of teenage girls, that 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse, and that the algorithm was deliberately pushing content related to anorexia and self-harm to vulnerable young users because that content generated engagement. She said the algorithm was causing teenagers to be exposed to more anorexia content, pulling families apart, and in places like Ethiopia, literally fanning ethnic violence. She said Facebook's leadership knew all of this and repeatedly chose profit over safety. Facebook's response was to call her document stolen. In Britain, the media story played out differently, but the pattern was the same. In 2011, the news of the world, the Sunday tabloid, that had been a fixture of British life for over 150 years, was shut down after it emerged that journalists had been hacking the phones of celebrities, politicians, and most shockingly, the murdered schoolgirl, Millie Dowler. They had accessed her voicemail while her family was still desperately searching for her, giving her parents false hope that she was still alive. The Levison inquiry that followed exposed a culture of illegal surveillance, bribery of police officers, and a cosy relationship between media owners and politicians that most people had suspected but never seen laid bare. Murdoch himself was called before Parliament. The news of the world closed. Within months it was replaced by The Sun on Sunday. Same owner, same building, same operation under a new name. And now we have TikTok, which is perhaps the most revealing example of all because it shows what happens when a media platform emerges that the existing power structures don't control. TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, launched in 2018 and grew faster than any social media platform in history. By 2024, it had over 170 million users in the United States alone. It became the primary news and culture platform for an entire generation, a place where ordinary people could reach millions of viewers without needing a publisher, a broadcaster, or an algorithm designed by an American technology company. It was also, for the first time, a major media platform that wasn't owned by a Western corporation. The US government's response was to try to ban it. The stated reason was national security, the concern that ByteDance could be compelled by the Chinese government to hand over user data or manipulate the algorithm to influence American public opinion. In 2024, President Biden signed a bipartisan law requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok's US operations or face a nationwide ban. In January 2025, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law. On January 19, 2025, TikTok went dark in America. Twelve hours later, it was restored after Donald Trump indicated he'd delay enforcement. Over the following year, Trump delayed the ban three separate times while a deal was negotiated. In January 2026, the deal was finalized. TikTok's US operations were transferred to a new majority American-owned joint venture led by Oracle, with US investors holding 65% and ByteDance reduced to less than 20% ownership. A board of directors filled with national security advisors and cybersecurity experts was installed. The algorithm, the thing that actually determines what 170 million people see every day, is still licensed from ByteDance, just reviewed and retrained under American oversight. It's worth asking why a government that has never passed a comprehensive data privacy law to protect its own citizens from American technology companies was so urgently concerned about a Chinese one. Facebook harvested the data of 87 million people and used it to manipulate elections. Instagram knowingly harmed teenage girls and chose profit over their safety. Fox News broadcast lies about a presidential election and paid three-quarters of a billion dollars in damages. None of these platforms were banned. None of these companies were forced to sell. The concern, it seems, is not about what's being done with people's data or what's being shown to their children. It's about who's doing it. Every new form of media in human history has followed the same arc. It emerges as a tool that gives ordinary people access to information and a voice. It disrupts the existing power structures. Those structures resist, then adapt, then absorb it. The printing press was suppressed, then controlled by the state and the church. Radio was commercialized and regulated. Television was consolidated into a handful of corporate networks. The internet was colonized by platforms that turned human attention into a commodity. Social media promised to give everyone a voice and ended up giving the loudest, angriest, and most dishonest voices the biggest megaphone, while the platforms that enabled it collected the data and pocketed the advertising revenue. The signal keeps trying to get through, and every time it does, someone builds a fence around it, puts a price on it, and tells you it's for your own protection.