Mainstream media is undoubtedly the right's favorite talking point. They contend that popular media is used to control popular opinion, to overthrow nations, brainwash the masses, and to make buy people buy junk they don't need. However, the mainstream media is not as mainstream as many people believe it is. For example, NBC Nightly News used to have 45 million viewers in 1980. That is a substantial amount of viewers, but it is still not even close to a third of the 330 million people currently living in the United States today. What is even more interesting is NBC Nightly News' audience today is a shell of its former self, with only 2 million viewers in 2020, which is up from 2019 and has started to fall back to prior levels in 2021. The fact is that most people do not watch television news any longer. The average television media audience is about three million and it does not matter if they promote right wing, left wing or centrist views. Do not even get me started on newspapers and magazines which are essentially akin to phone booths in terms of social relevance. Most newspapers maybe average about 500,000 readers, if they are lucky. So what is this mainstream media the right is always railing against. Well, if you look at where people get their news today, over half of the nation gets it on, you guessed it, social media. However, social media websites do not have the biases that everyone is always going on about. Why? Because social media is based on algorithms that simply show the viewer the news that they want to see. Thus, any criticism that a person has of social media news,  is really just them saying that they hate their own opinions. There is no mainstream media in America. Anyone who says that there is is paranoid, delusional or trying to advance some political agenda of their own.