Take control of it for yourself.

Half of Americans say news and current events matter a lot to their daily lives, while 30 percent say the news doesn’t have much to do with them. The rest aren’t sure. A quarter of Americans say they paid a lot of attention to the news on Tuesday, with 32 percent paying just some attention, 26 percent paying not very much attention and 18 percent paying no attention at all. Forty-seven percent thought the news was at least a little busier than average. Of those who paid any attention to the news on Tuesday, 32 percent spent an hour or more reading, watching or listening. About 23 percent spent 30 minutes to an hour, 18 percent spent 15 minutes to half an hour, and 21 percent spent less than 15 minutes. Just 15 percent of those who paid any attention to the news Tuesday have a great deal of trust in the media to state the facts fully, accurately and fairly. Thirty-eight percent have a fair amount of trust, 28 percent don’t have much trust in the media, and 11 percent have none at all. Those who followed the news on Tuesday were most likely to say they had gotten their news from an online news source (42 percent) or local TV (37 percent), followed by national cable TV (33 percent), social media (28 percent), national network news (23 percent), radio (19 percent) and conversations with other people (19 percent). The least popular source was print newspapers and magazines (10 percent).

Most Americans pay at least a little attention to current events, but they differ enormously in where they turn to get their news and which stories they pay attention to. To get a better sense of how a busy news cycle played out in homes across the country, we repeated an experiment, teaming up with YouGov to ask 1,000 people nationwide to describe their news consumption and respond to a simple prompt: “In your own words, please describe what you would say happened in the news on Tuesday.”

"The internet has become the main threat — a sphere that isn't controlled by the Kremlin," said Pavel Chikov, a member of Russia's presidential human rights council. "That's why they're going after it. Its very existence as we know it is being undermined by these measures."

"Putin was never very fond of the internet even in the early 2000s," said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist who specializes in security services and cyber issues. "When he was forced to think about the internet during the protests, he became very suspicious, especially about social networks. He thinks there's a plot, a Western conspiracy against him. He believes there is a very dangerous thing for him and he needs to put this thing under control."

As I wrote in “Hacking the Attention Economy,” manipulating the media for profit, ideology, and lulz has evolved over time. The strategies that hackers, hoaxers, and haters have taken have become more sophisticated. The campaigns have gotten more intense. And now many of the actors most set on undermining institutionalized information intermediaries are in the most powerful office in the land. They are waging war on the media and the media doesn’t know what to do other than to report on it.

To understand the current information ecosystem, we need to break down three elements:The different types of content that are being created and sharedThe motivations of those who create this contentThe ways this content is being disseminated