Markus Mobius News Today

Opinion: Google and Facebooks divide-and-rule strategy will hurt publishers and the public Imagine walking into a kiosk, and all national newspaper shelves are empty. This is what Australian Facebook users experienced during the eight days Facebook banned national news from its platform. We could choose to go to another kiosk in the analog world if we had the time and energy, but what if there was only one kiosk left in town? This scenario might not worry most if they are not in Australia an...

When I was the chief economist at the US Federal Communications Commission, we oversaw was the acquisition of DirecTV, the satellite pay-TV platform, by News Corp in 2003. Prior to the merger, DirecTV did not own significant content, and content-rich News Corp did not own a pay-TV distribution platform. Economic analysis showed the merged entity would have the incentive to raise the price of certain TV channels, such as the Fox broadcast network and Fox sports channels, that were sold to rival...

Despite growing evidence that exposure to and engagement with disinformation narrowly defined on the basis of identified problematic domains is a very small part of most people’s media use, concentrated among partisans actively seeking it out, and often primarily consumed by people who consume far more news from established outlets, survey research suggests very widespread concern over disinformation, especially online.  One survey conducted in 2020 asked respondents across 40 media markets ...