Big Tech is muscling in on the media sphere.
What happened: MTS — short for Monitoring the Situation, a reference to a popular meme in the predictions market community — made its debut on X earlier this week. The news show is backed by powerful VC firm Andreessen Horowitz and a handful of other investors.
It’s an outgrowth of the firm’s a16z Substack, which launched last year, and is part 24/7 cable news, part livestream, and part ‘really online guy scrolling through X.’
Zoom out: MTS is part of a growing ecosystem of media outlets that are tech-friendly, and increasingly tech-owned. The most notable of these is TBPN, a business and technology news show that found popularity on X and was purchased by OpenAI earlier this month, but there are many other examples.
There are pods like The Lex Fridman Show where CEOs feel like they’ll be safe from heavy scrutiny. Then there’s new publications like Republic, which Palantir founded last year to espouse the company’s worldview.
Why it matters: Media coverage of tech has, broadly speaking, skewed negative for over a decade now as the bloom came off the rose of Y2K-era techno-optimism. What we’re starting to see now is a concerted effort by the tech world to take control of the narrative.
An explicit goal of Andreessen Horowitz’s media venture is to build a place where founders can “win the narrative battle online”.
Our take: Just because an outlet is tech-friendly or tech-owned doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t create content that’s enjoyable or even insightful. However, we have doubts MTS will make anything of value — we tried watching it and had to turn it off after a few minutes.—QH
