One day in July 2016, Casey Newton, a tech reporter for The Verge, sat down at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park for the biggest interview of his career. Across from him was Mark Zuckerberg. With his characteristic geeky excitement, Zuckerberg described the promising initial test flight of Aquila, a drone with a wingspan larger than a 737 jet that was part of his plan to provide internet connectivity all over the world.

Though Newton hadn’t witnessed the test flight in Yuma, Arizona—no members of the press were invited—he believed Zuckerberg’s account of it. When his article was published, it reported that Aquila “was so stable that they kept it in the air for 90 minutes before landing it safely.”

Months later, however, a Bloomberg story revealed that the flight hadn’t gone so smoothly after all—Aquila had crashed. While the craft had indeed stayed aloft for longer than intended, high winds tore a chunk out of a wing, leading to a crash landing.

“I immediately, of course, felt like an idiot,” Newton says. “In retrospect there were definitely questions that I should have asked that I did not.”

Facebook downplayed the crash, offering to the press a range of excuses: a rough landing was always expected; the cause was mostly a software malfunction; the long flight time was the real story. Newton published a more critical follow-up piece, but the damage was done: he had been had. (The Aquila drone was soon grounded and, within two years, the entire program scrapped.)

“That experience, honestly, it really changed the way I thought about the company and reported on the company,” Newton says. “Before that, I sort of thought, My goal is to get in front of Mark Zuckerberg and ask him questions, and if I do that, I can do good journalism.” After the Aquila experience, Newton realized that he could be sitting in front of the CEO and still not get the story. “You’re better off trying to report around the margins of the company.”

Newton is still in touch with executives at Facebook—some of them are subscribers to his newsletter—but he’s since focused his attention on the company’s abuses of low-level employees and third-party contractors. He no longer trusts Facebook like he once did.

It can feel impossible to comprehend Facebook’s total influence—or to overstate its impact on journalism.

Newton’s professional arc, from enthusiastic tech beat reporter to skeptical industry investigator, matches the trajectories of a number of journalists in recent years. The 2016 presidential election in particular prompted a change in worldview against Facebook and the power wielded by Big Tech. The media had learned, perhaps belatedly, the cost of taking Facebook at its word. More recent, and adversarial, reporting has produced important stories about Facebook’s refusal to tackle the proliferation of right-wing extremism and conspiracy theories on its platform. In advance of the 2020 election, more journalists are taking a hard look at the Trump campaign’s once-heralded digital operation, which spends heavily on Facebook advertising, and its bombastic overseer, Brad Parscale, who has been promoted to overall campaign manager.

Beyond the company’s dissembling, reporting on Facebook’s operations has become increasingly complex simply because of its size. The company controls the communications and informational intake of more than two and a half billion people. It can feel impossible to comprehend its total influence—or to overstate its impact on journalism. The past four years have made tech reporters out of many journalists who would otherwise confine their scope of interest to politics, culture, labor, or economics. Facebook’s reach extends across every beat.

In conversations with more than fifteen journalists and industry observers, I tried to understand what it is like to cover Facebook. What I found was troublesome: operating with the secrecy of an intelligence agency and the authority of a state government, Facebook has arrogated to itself vast powers while enjoying, until recently, limited journalistic scrutiny. (Some journalists, like The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, have done important work linking Facebook data to political corruption in the UK and elsewhere.) Media organizations have stepped up their game, but they suffer from a lack of access, among other power asymmetries.

Many journalists contacted for this story declined to talk out of fear of hurting relationships with Facebook’s communications shop. A number of journalists agreed to be interviewed, only to pass after speaking to their editors and PR reps. Some spoke to me off the record.

Nearly everyone I talked to acknowledged that the relationship between Facebook and journalists had dramatically deteriorated in recent years. It wasn’t long ago, after all, that Facebook and its comms shop was, for many journalists, a valued source.

Facebook appeared in 2004, during a period of general techno-optimism. The site had a palatable origin story, a wunderkind founder, and a minimalist design, and it was largely treated as a trendy newcomer to the social network scene. Covering the company soon became a full-time job for some tech journalists, especially at digital publications like TechCrunch or Gizmodo that expected writers to generate a stream of news and scoops. Meanwhile, Facebook’s comms shop practically acted as an assignment editor, doling out exclusives to generate good press and curry favor with journalists.

Kate Losse, an early Facebook employee who would go on to write The Boy Kings, a memoir of her time at the company, told me in an email that journalistic coverage of Facebook in its first years was focused mostly on product updates. A notable story might be about a new feature in the site’s news feed.

Sam Biddle, a reporter at The Intercept who was working at Valleywag and Gizmodo in the early 2010s, told me that Facebook would offer up scoops to journalists that they credulously swallowed. “It was like pigs at a trough,” Biddle says. “We were all trying to get the same drip-drip of product news out of Facebook, no matter what outlet you were at.”

In those years, scandals involving the company were mostly low-grade stuff: users unhappy about design changes; public disputes between the founders (as dramatized in The Social Network); murky data collection practices that caused the FTC to force Facebook to sign a “consent decree” in 2011.

Facebook did face some public criticism about its role in eroding consumer privacy, but any skepticism tended to be watered down with exuberant praise. A 2008 GQ profile of Zuckerberg anointed him “Boy Genius of the Year” even as it asked, “Do you trust this face?”

In private, Facebook has cultivated relationships with writers and influencers while also carefully working to shape a public narrative. In 2018, as part of a lawsuit filed in a UK court, the company produced thousands of pages of documents and emails that revealed how the company’s comms team operated during part of 2014 and 2015. Staffers and their partners at the OutCast Agency, an outside firm, worked with reporters for months on articles that they hoped would paint the company in a good light. A Time magazine cover story about Facebook’s charitable mission to “wire the world” that was facilitated by Facebook’s Internet.org division was applauded internally as a win.

Sometimes, Facebook wrote the story itself. Emails in the document dump suggest that in 2014, in the run-up to Facebook’s F8 show, at which it unveils new features for developers, staff at the OutCast Agency wrote an article about how to use Facebook to build an app. They sent the article to a man named Eric Siu, who has written extensively and positively about using Facebook in business, for publication under his byline at Entrepreneur.com. The article does not appear to have been published, but it shows that Facebook is willing to push its message using Astroturfed content under the patina of credibility lent by sites like Entrepreneur. (Siu didn’t respond to requests for comment; nor did several former OutCast Agency staffers who now work in various divisions of Facebook.)