Facebook and Google execs privately complain about the barrage of critical coverage they face, charging that media companies have a financial incentive to attack them and that media execs are settling scores. They’re right.

Be smart: Outrage over Facebook’s misuse of user data and failure to rein in election fraud is real. But the zeal that media outlets bring to their Facebook coverage is personal, too. It’s turbocharged because journalists, individually and collectively, blame Facebook — along with other tech giants, like Google, and the internet itself — for seducing their readers, impoverishing their employers, and killing off their jobs.

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This blame war is the latest phase of a decades-long grudge match between traditional media companies and new technology giants.

  • In the ’90s, media stalwarts complained that Craigslist and eBay had stolen their classified business by posting ads for free — but paper classifieds were doomed the moment the web browser became popular.
  • In the 2000s, publishers lashed out at Google’s hammerlock on search, while they couldn’t even get search to work right on their own sites.
    • Incumbent media companies could have built and owned the digital advertising business themselves but they didn’t move fast and smart enough and worried too much about cannibalizing their existing revenue from print and airwave ads.
  • In this decade, publishers and broadcasters desperate for reach and revenue followed their readers onto Facebook, ignoring warnings that they were abandoning a direct relationship with their audience and allowing the social network to call too many shots.

Media companies stand to gain now from a public and regulatory backlash against social media that knocks Facebook and Google down a peg or two. Facebook and Google control roughly 60% of digital ad spending (which totaled $83 billion in 2017), so every peg counts.

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https://www.axios.com/media-vs-facebook-this-time-its-personal-1522183448-542df9fc-f4a5-41fe-964f-7c955bbb96c9.html