What is social media effect on commerce?

Is media bias having an increasingly coercive effect on the USA public policy?

• Is not a free, unbiased and effective press the cornerstone of a functioning and efficient democracy ?  Without that how can voters make informed optimal choices ? There has to be a powerful incentive to create media bias, it is complex and expensive to achieve, no easy task, uncertain results, a huge tangible concrete material gain must always exist as a reward to justify the effort. Unfortunately ordinary citizens and other nonprofit groups do not have this enormous powerful incentive.  Hence media bias is always for economic and / or political profit.  Typically at the expense of the society at large as non optimal policy decisions are a consequence, they are the result of this bias and control, not democratic free will. So the media bias grows, it becomes more powerful and more subtle at the same time.  It is blind hubris if one feels they can effectively filter it all out, as each individual will never be match for a determined well capitalized effort staffed by the smartest people on earth.  Money talks, in fact it talks in a very sweet pervasive compelling manner, it will always try to tell you what you want to hear. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool" Richard Feynman, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Physics 1965, a person smarter than most, who believed he was not smarter than most

• Answer:

  The biggest media bias is the brown nosing towards the corporations that buy ad space. Fox news only reports on news that its interns gleam from the NY Times. CNN actually reports but then spends stupid amounts of time on trials, and murder suspects, and the hollywood glitterati, so much so that their brand as a news organization has been forever damaged. Again, both of them do this for the ratings. If suddenly pure, unbiased, neutral news - something that was a mix of BBC and National Public Radio - were to appear on television, 24/7, and garner the highest ratings, which meant it could and did sell its ad space for the highest prices, both CNN and Fox would move in the that direction in a heart beat. Though only a fraction of TV watchers regularly watch the news, of those that do, at present, more watch FOX, which only reports the news it can slant to fit its slant, that watch CNN. The next time an earthquake or tsunami hits, check out both. CNN actually puts reporters on the ground, BBC actually puts or has reporters on the ground, FOX will have some talking head tell about it from their newsroom... The only time FOX ever bothers to send people out is if it happens in the USA. Or some picturesque foreign clime you can get to, first class, by plane.