“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a
conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But
when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”
Jobs was right to say it's not part of some grand conspiracy, but if you look more closely, you see that people ("consumers") and media are both produced by the same ideological and economic forces that serve each other. It's not some sinister plot, it's just how culture has developed to this point.
The media does give people what they want, but where do people get ideas of what they want? It's a dialectic, not a one-way causative relationship.
If it's a two-way conversation, I think it's fairly lopsided. The reason is: competition. When consumers only have one choice or a few, sure, that company can exercise a lot of power in dictating what people read, and thereby influence what they want (by limiting what's possible for them to experience and be aware of).
However, there are countless competing sources of entertainment and news online. If any particular organization gets away from giving consumers what they want, and instead becomes overly wrapped up in trying to tell consumers what they should want, they'll get eaten by the competition.
The result is a web in which billions of people flock to whatever "channel" has the message that resonates best. Meanwhile the people running these organizations are doing their best to figure out what will resonate, so they can survive and thrive. If a story gets clicks and shares, repeat. If it doesn't, stop writing things like that. Survival of the fittest.
There are some mitigating factors ofc. For example, a lot of smaller media orgs will simply copy what the bigger ones are doing, which gives the bigger ones a lot of influence. Also, there's momentum. Once you have a loyal audience, there's friction for them to switch to reading a different source, so you get more leeway.
But all things told, I think reader demand drives most of the content we see.
An ironic quote, considering that Steve Jobs literally conspired with Google and other SV companies to illegally depress wages for tech employees--to the tune of hundreds of millions in lost wages.
Steve Jobs