Margaret Sullivan with an astute and sobering take on the consolidation of conservative media power:
In 2020, only a tiny fraction of Americans got news from TikTok. These days, that number has soared to one in five.
For young adults, those figures are much higher, with almost half of adults under 30 getting news there, according to the Pew Research Center.
But who will own that hugely influential purveyor of information?
As with so much of American media – from television networks to some of the largest newspapers – the answer is shaping up to be as simple and short as a TikTok video: the ultra-rich.
As President Trump moved this week to clear the path to sell the platform’s US assets to a group of American investors, the metastasizing reality of media-by-oligarchy threatened to become even more extreme.