Hmmmm. I went looking for some video of Hurricane Michael taken by people along its path. I’m sure there were lots of people taking video or snapping photos with their phones during and after the storm.

I first checked YouTube. There was lots of video, but it was all from mainstream news sources. I didn’t find any amateur video there, or it was buried so far down the search that I gave up before seeing it.

Same thing when I searched Facebook for “hurricane michael.” The search was again dominated by mainstream news.

So here we have two systems for sharing that have the promise to make information a totally democratic commodity–anyone can theoretically have the same access to the public as the monied media–and yet that promise seems to have been smothered by the weight of the corporate media.

How is that happening?