The New York Times is reporting that ABC and Facebook have partnered to bring more political coverage to Facebook users. Through the partnership Facebook gets to distribute ABC’s political content for free and ABC gets exposure to the more then 52 million Facebook users. Facebook had already created the US Politics application but it hasn’t been extremely popular.

I’m not quite sure what else Facebook is looking to get out of this aside from free content. Free content is never a bad deal though. If you think about running a television station and not having to pay royalties on content, that’s always a great deal. It looks like the media companies are finally coming to terms and it also supports my argument that social networks are becoming the new television.

There is no discussion as to whether Facebook can generate advertising revenue on the pages that ABC content is being displayed or not. Conversely, ABC gets free exposure for their content through this agreement and can generate more advertising dollars by expanding their distribution channels. This partnership will also increase the need for politicians to become more active on Facebook. While a number of presedential candidates have created Facebook profiles, most of them have failed to do anything besides that.

Facebook had said that they were going to get more active in the campaigns. This is a giant step in increasing the political activity on their site.