Well, the media industry has been navigating substantial turmoil in recent years, from big mergers to layoffs to accusations of government censorship.

On a recent episode of our PBS News podcast, Settle in.

Jeff Bennett explored all this upheaval with Evan Shapiro.

He's an award-winning producer who now writes about the industry for his substack, media war and peace.

Here now is a clip of that conversation.

I do think, you know, we have this perception that very few people control the media.

That is less and less true on an ongoing basis, especially when you consider that YouTube is now the biggest channel on TV sets in the

U.S. and everyone says, well, they're the big tech, you know, they control so much voice.

In reality, YouTube is 4.6 million different channels, you know, and a million of them

control a lot of the voice there, but that's still a million channels. So in my mind, fragmentation

is now the most important factor in media. You know, I like to say that, you know, when I was

rising up in media, it was a lot easier because your competition was a few other channels.

Now your competition is everybody, all seven billion people on the planet Earth with a smartphone.

The good news is that back when I was coming up in media, there were only a few buyers of the stuff that you would make.

Now there are 7 billion, 8 billion buyers of the media you make.

So the control has shifted from these ivory towers who think they're still in charge to the consumer

themselves who really do control the media in their system settings whenever they touch that

piece of glass that they pick up first thing in the morning.

You recently gave a talk called the Year of Change or Die, which is pretty stark framing.

What did you mean by that?

So this is the year that the combination of the creator economy and mainstream media will

really intersect in a way that they hadn't before. And you see this in Procter & Gamble

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