Who is “the media”?

We hear quite a lot about “the media” leaning to one side, or the “the media” not promoting a particular event, but who exactly is “the media”? Increasingly, it’s us.

This is media. This post can be found in Google, or perhaps you found it via a social media channel. It’s media as much as anything else is media, though with a smaller audience than most big names.

Muzzled?

A story written by Josh Hawley a few days ago pointed in this direction. His article was titled “The muzzling of America”, about how he’s losing his voice — and it was the cover of the New York Post! That hardly seems like being muzzled. Techdirt did a great job of breaking it down if you want to check out their thoughts on it.

Where is the media?

Another example is a post from a friend of mine on Facebook, sharing a story from the Washington Post about people who cleaned trash off the streets after the events at the Capitol building.

A comment on her post simply said “Where is the media?” (to cover the clean-up), which was confusing to me.

This was an article from the Washington Post, shared by countless people on Facebook. The “media” covered it, but just maybe not the particular outlet she was hoping for. It’s not where is the media, but perhaps who is the media?

We’re the media

We’re not fully there yet, but content power is quickly moving into the our hands, and slowly away from the bigger companies.

CNN averages around 1.7M viewers, a pretty solid number. However, “MrBeast” has over 51M subscribers on YouTube, and Charli D’Amelio has over 105M followers on TikTok. They have potentially far more influence than CNN does, and it’s likely you’ve never heard of either of them.

There is only so much attention that a single person can give, so we’ll never hit a point where everyone has a million fans, but content distribution seems to be getting wider and wider.

Own your content. Share your views. You are the media.