Facebook Live Is the Right Wing’s New Fox News

Facebook Live might well be Mark Zuckerberg’s gift to right-wing-news—a medium designed to be low-key and at home in your News Feed, with a potential reach in the millions. There’s a unique opening in conservative media, one that has a slew of sites systematically turning to the live-streaming feature.

It stems from a single idea: Liberals have more choice in what they watch, and for a long time Republicans have felt limited to Fox News. In 2014, the Pew Research Center released a poll showing that unlike their liberal or moderate peers—who watched and consumed a wide variety of news—conservatives were limited to Fox for most of their political information. That seems to be changing. Facebook doesn’t release rankings of Facebook Live pages, and few analyst organizations are equipped to independently verify their traffic. But in the months just after the election, using word of mouth and sources at Facebook, I spent time with a few conservative news organizations and individuals who are using the emergence of live-streaming and the massive reach of the Facebook platform to reach legions of conservatives hungry for their kind of news.