Facebook news chief to media: ‘Work with Facebook or die’ / Boing Boing
▻https://boingboing.net/2018/08/13/facebook-news-chief-to-media.html
The Australian reports that Facebook media relations chief Campbell Brown privately disclosed that Mark Zuckerberg is indifferent to publishers and offers the news media a simple choice: “Work with Facebook or die.”
A senior Facebook executive has privately admitted Mark Zuckerberg “doesn’t care” about publishers and warned that if they did not work with the social media giant, “I’ll be holding your hands with your dying business like in a hospice”.
That’s a strange thought, isn’t it? Right down to how an attempt at intimidation is undermined its own awkward spitefulness.
Still, she (invoking he), is effectively threatening to destroy news publishers unless they comply with Facebook’s vision for their future. So everyone has work to do.
Brown was hired last year after to help Facebook “smooth over its strained ties to the news media.”
But Facebook executives said they were hiring Ms. Brown for her understanding of the news industry as a onetime White House correspondent, co-anchor of “Weekend Today” and primary substitute anchor of “Nightly News” at NBC News, and prime-time anchor on CNN, which she left in 2010.
Some commentators noted Ms. Brown’s ties to the Republican donor Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Education. Ms. DeVos’s family foundation funds The 74, an education-focused journalism site co-founded and led by Ms. Brown.
Hiring a DeVos crony to deal with fake news and media relations quickly became the Facebook Executives Puzzled By Human Emotion trainwreck it promised to be: Brown was last in the news threatening to sue The Guardian for breaking the Cambridge Analytica story.
