This intense competition over eyeballs is driven by the monetary system. Money printing creates a supply side economy (demand-constrained, as opposed to supply-constrained).
All companies just produce as many goods and services as they can using all the financing which is available to them. The biggest challenge in a supply side economy is finding customers to buy the goods which the company produced or plans to produce. It increases competition on the customer-acquisition side and reduces competition on the production side (I.e. quality goes down). It makes it almost impossible for small companies to compete.
The money printing acts as a kind of subsidy for big corporations (and regular citizens end up paying via inflation). Companies which are not subsidized cannot compete no matter how good their products are or how efficient they are at producing them. They can never get the same profit margins as big corporations due to the lack of subsidies. Subsidies from the money printer can come in the form of government grants, overly generous government contracts or from banks in the form of very low interest loans. It's an asymmetric playing field.
Yes there was. That trend started long before big tech. In the aughts there was a lot of constrination around news rooms being gutted, with less and less investigative journalism — replaced with “soft news”.
Those criticizing this and were called snobs and elitists; the market - the people - wanted soft news stories!
Interestingly the same ideological coterie that cheered news room gutting (because of a perceived ideological slant) and welcomed the soft news trend is now complaining about click-bait internet journalism.
But these points completely undermine the original OP - how can you blame media companies for pushing things that are "against our interests" when market forces overwhelmingly demonstrate that it's what we want?
If the media is showing these "alarmist" or "biased" stories, it's because it's what people want. People don't want honest journalism, otherwise C-SPAN would be the most popular outlet in America.
If you don't want media showing you clickbait and garbage, don't click on it. Simple as that.
All companies just produce as many goods and services as they can using all the financing which is available to them. The biggest challenge in a supply side economy is finding customers to buy the goods which the company produced or plans to produce. It increases competition on the customer-acquisition side and reduces competition on the production side (I.e. quality goes down). It makes it almost impossible for small companies to compete.
The money printing acts as a kind of subsidy for big corporations (and regular citizens end up paying via inflation). Companies which are not subsidized cannot compete no matter how good their products are or how efficient they are at producing them. They can never get the same profit margins as big corporations due to the lack of subsidies. Subsidies from the money printer can come in the form of government grants, overly generous government contracts or from banks in the form of very low interest loans. It's an asymmetric playing field.