Hello! On Presidents’ Day many are thinking of Jimmy Carter, the longest-living American president in history, who has started hospice care at his home in Georgia aged 98. Today we’re exploring:
The bias bubble
A Gallup and Knight Foundation report published last week found that most Americans now have a negative outlook on the news media landscape, with 53% reporting a very or at least somewhat unfavorable view.
Coverage across nearly every major story — from Chinese spy balloons to toxic chemical train derailments — is open to spin or sensationalism. That’s increasingly impactful in the internet age, when barriers to sharing information are at an all-time low. Misleading coverage can spread like wildfire, and exaggerated reporting often tends to break through more (you WON’T believe what Elon Musk said about the mainstream media in this tweet<<< click here).
Trust fall
Another series of surveys from Gallup reveals that 25% of Americans in 1993 reported having very little or no confidence in newspapers, a number that’s risen to 46% in the 30 years since. Confidence has fallen even further over the same period for TV news: 18% said they felt the same way about that source in 1993, a proportion that had grown to 53% in 2022.
Exactly why America is more distrustful of the media is unclear, though it coincides with the rise in political polarization that’s taken place over the last 25-30 years and the ascent of social media.
Go deeper: explore confidence in other American institutions via the Gallup data.
Broadcast Yourself
CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, announced last Thursday that she would be stepping down after 25 years at Google, with 9 at the helm of the world’s largest video sharing platform.
Wojcicki is Google royalty. She was initially the search engine’s first landlord, when she rented her garage out to co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. She went on to become the company’s first marketing manager and helped to drive the development of AdSense, which transformed the web by enabling websites to make money through displaying Google ads. Then, in 2006, she convinced the board to spend $1.65bn acquiring a startup called YouTube after noticing the company was outcompeting her unit — Google Video.
Content is queen
Wojcicki officially became CEO of YouTube in 2014. She maintained the early focus on creators, keeping YouTube’s near 50:50 split of advertising revenue, helping to ensure the platform always had the content that people wanted to watch, even if it sacrificed some earnings in the short term.
That focus brought the usual problems associated with user-generated content, such as moderation and how to handle bad actors, but it's ultimately propelled YouTube to second place on the list of most visited websites. Its popularity has seen YouTube become the birthplace of enormous media empires like that of Mr. Beast. One of the site’s most popular creators, he's racked up a total of 22.7 billion views on his main channel, earning some $50m+ last year, per Forbes.
A little less conversation…
In recent weeks, oil giant BP has quietly scaled back its climate commitments. The original goal, a 35-40% reduction in emissions by 2030 (relative to 2019 levels), has now been downgraded to a more modest 20-30% cutback. The less ambitious target comes after BP made record profits of $27.7bn last year.
The changes come after a multi-year charm offensive to rebrand BP, with its annual reports giving a sense of just how much the corporation is talking about clean energy. Over the past decade the use of the words “sustainability”, “emissions” and “renewable” has continued to climb, getting mentioned a total 637 times in the 2021 annual report. That’s a 600% increase on 10 years prior, although the reports themselves have become ~30% longer too.
…a little more action, please
BP's moving goalposts follow a year in which prices for fossil fuels soared following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Convincing shareholders that renewable energy investments would yield similar returns to reliable hydrocarbon projects is presumably difficult to begin with, and doubly so when oil prices surge to decade-highs at $110 a barrel (as they did last year).
In fairness to BP, even with the tempered 2030 emissions targets, the company has maintained its ambition to get to net zero by 2050 — and its goals remain some of the most aggressive of any major oil company.
• Anything Twit can do: Meta will test its own paid verification service on Instagram and Facebook starting at $11.99 a month.
• An art collector accidentally knocked over a $42k Jeff Koons balloon dog at a VIP opening night in Miami.
• Japan’s official island count could double after a land survey turned up over 7,000 new and unrecognized islands.
• UberEats has crunched the numbers on the weird and wonderful food delivery trends of 2022.
• Sending a letter and using a cookbook are just some of the old-fashioned practices that Americans still love doing.
Off the charts: Which company, that just reported strong earnings that sent its shares to two-year highs, were we charting about back in November? [Answer below].
Answer here.
