Well the difference is that Facebook is an aggregator and doesn't actually publish or write any of their own content. They're a media company, sure, but they're not directly comparable to newspapers or cable news outlets.

Google doesn't make the ads either, they just publish them on their platform

In a world in which any piece of content you want to exist does exist because someone is written it (and we're a lot closer to that world now than in Hearst's day), power lies not in production of content but in control over which content actually gets seen.

From a consumer point of view, Facebook is pretty much a news source. For some even the only news source.

Facebook is an editor(like at a newspaper), except in this case editorial control is determine by billions of users and a completely opaque "News Feed" algorithm.

Remember, people don't just share articles, they share articles with their commentary.

Channel matters FAR more than content.

("Content is king" was always a distraction. And that came from Sumner Redstone (Viacom), not Bill Gates, who only quoted it.)

They do though, Facebook Watch is them funding original content.

Exactly what do newspapers and cable news have in common with each other that Facebook doesn't?

They pay reporters.

Quite many of them don't, many (most?) not-top newspapers re-publish news gathered by others; many (most?) cable companies don't produce any news content themselves but just provide access to a bunch of news channels. Those still are media companies.

> many (most?) not-top newspapers re-publish news gathered by others

If you're referring to AP and other news services, they pay quite a lot for that, so the reporters are paid. Also, they contribute their own stories from their paid reporters to the service for other members to share.

Facebook employs moderators.

You don't see a difference between a moderator and a reporter in terms of content creation?

In other words: Facebook doesn't employ journalists, certainly not to do journalism.

> I say the same about largest media company in the world.

Indeed. I was just reading about the local broadcast rules (specifically: Sinclair broadcasting wants to buy Tribune media, and the FCC appears to be saying 'go ahead".) . Some people are concerned that this violates rules against concentration of ownership in broadcast stations.

But doesn't Facebook operate in essentially 100% of US markets? Should we even care who owns the TV broadcasts?

The rule was made because radio waves (broadcast) is a finite resource, and so there are a limited number of players who can compete.

The internet can, theoretically, have an unlimited number of competitors, so it's not regulated the same way.

Sure, that mattered in the 1930s but does it really matter any more?

Are there suddenly unlimited over-the-air frequencies available to broadcasters?

No, but there are so many channels of info these days OTA broadcast is a minor part of it. In addition the economics of the business lead to increasing amounds of network content rather than expensive locally generated content on the airwaves. And in fact OTA is much less common than watching local channels mixed in with otehr channels on cable, so again the local channels aer drowned out.

Looking up the stats a couple of weeks ago during a different HN discussion I was shocked how popular TV still is across all demographics, but local content was a plummeting percentage of the total.

Might it not be Google?