A Battle For Hearts and Minds
The headline comes from an old saying about warfare, that the battle is not just about military victories but is really for the hearts and minds of the people. In the political war being waged in America now, the latest statistics on Facebook’s top publishers shows the battle lines are pretty evenly drawn. Conservative sites scored ten of the top 25 spots while what one could call “non-conservative” sites scored 12 of them. Three sites probably wouldn’t fall into either category.
An even clearer picture of the battle line can be seen by looking at the number of engagements with the ten conservative sites scoring 118 Million engagements while the non-conservative sites scored 128 Million engagements.
The term non-conservative is used because while some of the sites might be considered ‘liberal’ many of the site publishers would dispute that labelling. Conservatives would no doubt label CNN, NPR, NBC, NYTimes and Washington Post as ‘liberal’ and to some extent that argument could be made. However, sites Reuters, the BBC, Business Insider and The Hill are even more debatable as liberal.
The conservative sites though clearly and proudly declare themselves conservative. The one exception might be The Daily Mail which the site Mediabiasfactcheck.com labels ‘pending review. At one time Fox News might even have claimed not to be extreme conservative but not any more as they admit to being more entertainment than news. A visit to the other sites — such as The Blaze, Rumble, The Western Journal and Breitbart show a clear conservative, bordering on alt-right, theme even though some of these haven’t been labelled yet by Media Bias Fact Check.
The three sites that I put in the non-political category are Koreaboo.com, Sportskeeda.com which are primarily focused on entertainment and celebrities, along with The People magazine site.
Leading the pack in the #1 spot, yet again, is The Daily Wire which scored nearly 27 Million engagements. Even more impressive they did it with only 1,045 postings. Clearly their followers are highly engaged. By comparison, the BBC was much further behind in the #2 spot with nearly 19 Million but with ten times the postings (18,751).
Politics dominated The Daily Wire’s most successful postings but were much less of a factor in the other publishers’ postings. Politics accounted for only one of the top 25 web articles with a piece by American Military News on Trump visiting NYC on 9/11. Celebrity deaths accounted for three of the top posts,
Most were “feel good” articles with the #1 piece by Animals Kingdom about a boy being adopted by his best friend’s family. Then there was the one about the 13 year old kid majoring in aerospace engineering, or the dog swimming through waters to save an autistic child.
Enjoy the ‘feel good’ articles while you can because no doubt the political postings will increase as the election grows nearer.
