A Facebook Manager Just Went On A Huge Rant Against The Media - And The Media Has A Big Problem With It

Mike Hudack, a product manager for ads on Facebook, wrote a post today ranting against the state of journalism.

According to Hudack, journalism has moved away from the serious stuff like covering wars and politics to the clicky articles you see on sites like BuzzFeed.

He writes:

And so we turn to the Internet for our salvation. We could have gotten it inThe Huffington Post but we didn't. We could have gotten it in BuzzFeed, but it turns out that BuzzFeed's homepage is like CNN's but only more so. Listicles of the "28 young couples you know" replace the kidnapped white girl. Same thing, different demographics.

Hudack calls out other publications and networks like CNN, Vox, and Vice for contributing to the problem.

A lot of plugged-in media folks responded to Hudack's post, but the best comes from Alexis Madrigal, a senior editor at The Atlantic, who makes an important point.

It's Hudack's own company, Facebook, that's partly to blame for a lot of the non-hard content that many media companies feel inclined to create. And people are more likely to share the lighter fare than the so-called serious journalism.

The irony is that a high-level Facebook employee is ranting against a problem his own company helped create.

Here's Madrigal:

My perception is that Facebook is the major factor in almost every trend you identified. I'm not saying this as a hater, but if you asked most people in media why we do these stories, they'd say, "They work on Facebook." And your own CEO has even provided an explanation for the phenomenon with his famed quote, "A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa." This is not to say we (the (digital) media) don't have our own pathologies, but Google and Facebook's social and algorithmic influence dominate the ecology of our world.

Here's the full post, lightly edited to strip out some profanity:

Please allow me to rant for a moment about the state of the media.

It's well known that CNN has gone from the network of Bernie Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett reporting live from Baghdad in 1991 to the network of kidnapped white girls. Our nation's newspapers have, with the exception of The New York Times, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal been almost entirely hollowed out. They are ghosts in a shell.

Evening newscasts are jokes, and copycat television newsmagazines have turned into tabloids -- "OK" rather than Time. 60 Minutes lives on, suffering only the occasional scandal. More young Americans get their news from The Daily Show than from Brokaw's replacement. Can you even name Brokaw's replacement? I don't think I can.

Meet the Press has become a joke since David Gregory took over. We'll probably never get another Tim Russert. And of course Fox News andmsnbc care more about telling their viewers what they want to hear than informing the national conversation in any meaningful way.

And so we turn to the Internet for our salvation. We could have gotten it inThe Huffington Post but we didn't. We could have gotten it in BuzzFeed, but it turns out that BuzzFeed's homepage is like CNN's but only more so. Listicles of the "28 young couples you know" replace the kidnapped white girl. Same thing, different demographics.

We kind of get it from VICE. In between the salacious articles about Atlanta strip clubs we get the occasional real reporting from North Korea or Donetsk. We celebrate these acts of journalistic bravery specifically because they are today so rare. VICE is so gonzo that it's willing to do real journalism in actually dangerous areas! VICE is the savior of news!

And we come to Ezra Klein. The great Ezra Klein of Wapo and msnbc. The man who, while a partisan, does not try to keep his own set of facts. He founded Vox. Personally I hoped that we would find a new home for serious journalism in a format that felt Internet-native and natural to people who grew up interacting with screens instead of interacting with screens from couches with bags of popcorn and a beer to keep their hands busy.

And instead they write stupid stories about how you should wash your jeans instead of freezing them. To be fair their top headline right now is "How a bill made it through the worst Congress ever." Which is better than "you can't clean your jeans by freezing them."

The jeans story is their most read story today. Followed by "What microsoft doesn't get about tablets" and "Is '17 People' really the best West Wing episode?"

It's hard to tell who's to blame. But someone should fix this s---.