I review Andrey Mir’s PostJournalism. [link fixed]
But relatively placid stories do not motivate people to pay subscription fees. Today, people can get news for free. They can get sports scores, financial information, and entertainment without going to newspapers. Mir argues that nowadays people pay newspapers to validate their worldviews. Newspapers do this most effectively by highlighting stories about the outrageous actions of their subscribers’ political adversaries.
An excerpt cannot do justice to my review. And the review cannot do justice to the book.
The feedly link wasn’t working for me, so if you have the same issue, you can try this direct link to econlib, How Economics Drives News Media. If the link above is changed, please delete this comment, thanks.
Thank you. The Feedly link also didn’t work for me.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t need to pay anyone to validate or confirm the outrageous actions of my political adversaries.
They provide that free of charge.
Touche!
Mir has a good thesis here consistent with my “market for confirmation bias”, but there are several other forces pushing the American journalism sector farther and farther along this trend.
First, it’s interesting to consider the different historical path taken in many European countries. Unlike their prestigious Anglosphere counterparts, many competing journalistic publications with significant readership, if they bothered to do so at all, adopted only the slightest pretense to objectivity and rigorous journalistic standards and ethics, and were instead widely understood to be *openly partisan rags*.
I think some of this is due to different European culture and a heavier dose of long-standing cynicism and realism concerning the propaganda function intrinsic to all opinion-influencing institutions, within which claims to ‘objectivity’ and ‘integrity’ were viewed with skeptical disdain as something only very naive chumps would ever fall for.
Ironically, the Anglospheric adversarial trial system understands lawyers in a trial as being one-sided advocates, competing to influence an audience by presenting a version of the narrative in the light most flattering to their clients.
The (old) European inquisitorial system (and some American military / administrative systems) conceived as the investigator-prosecutor-judge as a bureaucratic official who could be better relied upon for reasonable, reliably objective, and neutral results with spin or favoritism. Each system claims superiority in terms of arriving at conclusions closer to the Truth. But for journalism, the situations were reversed.
Another difference is the dominating role played by a highly centralized state-owned (or nominally private, but heavily state-favored-and-subsidized) news organization. These highest-status media entities *did* (practically by political necessity given their state-issued nature) adopt the pretense of giving the public the “Non-Partisan Truth”, which had the effect of sucking all the oxygen out of the room for other players aspiring to that niche (which they wouldn’t be trusted to do fairly anyway), forcing them to serve the virulently partisan parts of the market.
Perhaps most media environments have a kind of natural niche for one (or a tier of just a few) highest-status source of journalism, and in Europe this was occupied by the state, whereas in the US it was (once) occupied by the New York Times and a few others.
There is also the question of whether this is sustainable – not necessarily economically – but intellectually and ideologically, if dissenting voices start to gain popularity and influence. This is the “paradox of polarization”, which is analogous to the “paradox of power”. The paradox of power that with secure, dictatorial power, a dictator is incentivized to act less tyrannically, not more, even though they could. Likewise, if you give high-status leftist journalists a secure quasi-monopoly, they can relax about the risk of dissent and not feel pressured to drop standards and compromise every other value in the name of wining the war of opinion. They still want to win, but the total war of ideological influence operates under the principle of “by any means necessary”, and if they don’t *need* the worst means, there will be more leeway given for the operation of norms of high quality, rigor, standards. Deviations from those standards were seen not as indications of loyalty and determination like today, but of classlessness and cheap, low quality hack work of the kind which ought to be suppressed by shunning for Levin-esque reasons of tending to undermine the good-will and trust the *general* public (not just a partisan audience) places in the institution and sector at large, which in turn sustained the widest possible market and the ability to easily influence the whole population instead of just half of it. This is perhaps a real example of the pressure of competition to what was once a “cartel of consensus” making such norms unsustainable in the long term.
When all the major journalistic institutions kept more-or-less to the same ‘party line’ like the old TV-network-news stations did before cable, perhaps it’s easier to behave like merely one bureau of what is effectively one giant media institution, the top one filling that “Objective Truth” niche in the marketplace, which enables the maintenance of higher standards and, while a certain amount of bias would be bound to come through, subdues the temptation to go Full Propaganda in one’s reporting. Once Fox News comes onto the scene, and/or the internet starts filling up with popular dissents from the mainstream media consensus, then the whole Nash Equilibrium of the game immediately breaks down.
Second, dissemination of information by internet with a marginal cost of zero creates such enormous economies of scale that, as with most other related sectors, the forces pushing towards a “winners take most” economy and complete centralization with a focal point on the highest status organization are bound to leave only a few players left on the field. This helps us to explain why: “But others, such as the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, saw their audience plummet by more than 80 percent.” It’s hardly like LATimes and SF Chronicle were behind NYT on going Full Partisan, indeed, they were clearly well ahead of the curve. It’s just that they were considered ‘local’, and provincial and lower status, and thus it was impossible for them to capitalize on the strategy. Indeed, all those other publications, despite being ahead of the pack, probably did *worse*, in large part *because* the NYT and others started taking over the turf of their pre-existing style, which is like a super-efficient national chain driving a lot of local mom-and-pops out of business.
Consider also that plenty of other journalistic entities, publications, radio news outlets, and so forth – the kinds to which one couldn’t avoid exposure by osmosis on most college campuses even if one tried – and which had long been much more partisan, edgy, vicious, polarizing, antagonistic, and so forth, and some of which, like Pacifica Foundation, already ran on money raised by “donscriptions”, or were part of the long tradition of megadonor patron-subsidized “vanity press”.
In other words, which one might think were “strategically well-positioned” to serve and reap the new audiences because they were ahead of the curve and had already adopted the ideological and financial aspects of the ‘business model’ that was going to be successful, thus perhaps they ought to have had some advantage in breaking out to oust the current market leaders. But this didn’t happen at all, and most attempts to create new, independent orgs fell flat or, maybe just plateaued at a low level.
In sectors where name-recognition and familiarity with the consensus that something is high-status, it’s truly remarkable how stable the top few names have been in the Postwar era. I’ve noticed this trend towards “incumbentocracy” at the high level in politics too: if you look at many recent world leaders, their tenures – either in their current position or at the highest levels – have been incredibly long and secure compared to most of their predecessors, and as in aristocracies, the issue of problem of creating room for fresh blood seems to mostly be one resolved by the ‘biological solution’. This is certainly true where I work too.
At any rate, it seems to me, it wasn’t really economic and technological changes encouraging audiences to move to where they could get more polarized partisanship for donscriptions. Instead, audiences were going to stick with the highest-status organizations, to affiliate themselves with that level of status, and those organizations having to change themselves to imitate the already existing business models of their lower status, edgier rivals. Business model and overly ideological partisanship may change for the sake of revenues, but centralization on the highest status outlets remains the same.
Third, and related to centralization in general, is the nationalization of political authorities and the overall political conversation, crowding out most focus on and awareness of local affairs (much to the dismay of federalists and localists). Who cares about local legislation when anything you try to do of any importance end up in Federal Court, the subject of Federal law? Here is a distressing example: It is human nature for kids to pretend they are inquiring or arguing about preferences when they are really probing for membership in certain tribes and cliques ranked by coolness, and to use such badges of identification as common ground for bonds of fraternity. “What kind of music do you like”, “Which sports team do you root for?” I was chagrined to learn that for my kids’ schools, politics plays a substantial part of this role now, “What about this thing Trump/Biden did?” #Sad!
Universalist ideology (and some crises like war, climate, and pandemics) are inherently well adapted to nationalization and globalism without admitting any legitimate basis for local variation, and journalism (i.e., also politics) framed around arguing about such ideological positions is inherently centralizable in just one or a few outlets.
My neighbors are pretty smart, successful, educated, politically-engaged, and consider themselves well-informed, but practically none of them even know the name of their state delegate or senator, or the names of any members on any local councils, or what any of those people are doing, unless it pops up as a hot topic on Facebook or something. This state of affairs naturally leads to there only being room for a few entities which have the highest prestige or which enjoy quasi-monopoly status on the basis of being a nominal focal point and enjoying entrenched network effects.
Finally, related to the ‘biological solution’, is that it seems that a large part of the deterioration and negative changes happening to the high status outlets like the NYT is being driven by a new generation of younger employees who are able to exploit and leverage the conditions of the current ideological moment to militate in favor of rapid and extreme lurches in the direction of being “100% Woke 100% Of The Time.” That has less to do directly with broad economic or technological factors than with the increased radicalism of the youth and the effective weaponization of ideology in the form of a cancel culture which adult management feels powerless to resist while keeping their status (or heads).
This is reminiscent of what happened in the rise of Japanese Militarism prior to WWII, the mechanism of obeying the principle of “leadership from below” (i.e., from junior officers profoundly more aggressive and reckless than their more sober generals) leading to the ideological singularity of competitive sanctimony of wanting to signal more pious commitment to the cause than the next guy, which quickly and irreversibly led to the same sort of predictable political and human catastrophes of the French and Russian Revolutions.
This is the kind of thing – what I call a Social Failure Mode – would could be unleashed even absent major economic or technological changes of the sort Mir describes, and which seems to be currently in full operation in the media sector without any sign of where or how it would stop.
it’s truly remarkable how stable the top few names have been in the Postwar era
Are you talking about media or universities?
Both, and a lot more to include political leaders, top officials at government agencies, celebrities, corporations, popular consumer brands, and more. Average tenure and age for a lot of things seems to have gone way up, in a way that isn’t just some consequence of population age demographics.
My rough impression is that the advantage of being an established leader, prominent name, A-lister, or incumbent in a field has, for whatever reasons, gotten a lot stronger in the past two decades.
Incumbentocracy is a big topic, but in general, I’d say if you look at the set of names in the top echelon of a lot of different areas, the longevity and stability of those sets has tended to increase a lot.
I don’t see The paradox of power as often actually being true.
But, most of your thoughts here do ring true enough, esp.
“only being room for a few entities which have the highest prestige, or which enjoy quasi-monopoly status, on the basis of being a nominal focal point, and enjoying entrenched network effects.”
Good review. I see one large omission:
The big piece Kling is omitting is wealthy financial backers. For example, Jeff Bezos has full private ownership of Washington Post. The widow of Steve Jobs has ownership of Axios and The Atlantic. There are also corporate backers like Google that pays money to select news outlets they like, while reducing the circulation and demonetizing outlets like The Federalist that they dislike.
Washington Post doesn’t disclose subscriber numbers, but estimates are around ~2 million. I imagine those subscribers, in aggregate, have some influence, but I imagine the main influence is Jeff Bezos who has full ownership of the entire outlet and directs them as he wishes.
NYT writers feel that FBI officials are morally justified fabricating evidence to get a FISA warrant.
FBI officials feel morally justified fabricating evidence to get a FISA warrant.
We don’t need two separate explanations, one for the NYT and one for the FBI.
If Kevin Clinesmith had been on the wrong team, if he’d been a Republican and had committed his crime for the sake of the GOP, then it would have been the biggest scandal since that time Trump was accused of violating the emoluments clause with a golf course development in Scotland. It would have been even more outrageous, according to CNN and to NPR, than that golf course thing.
Democrats at the NYT and the FBI would have denounced Clinesmith for abusing his powers to get at the Democratic Party, if he had tried to get at the Democratic Party.
This is the problem with Mir’s explanation, as clever as it is.
We don’t need two separate explanations for why the NYT published the false claim about Brian Sicknick and, on the other hand, why government officials fed the false claim to the NYT.
If you’re a writer at the NYT then you’re not a government official. But you repeat what government officials feed you. You’re not upset when they lie to you. They share your ideas of why packing the court is morally justified, or what the IRS can do to its targets and be morally justified.
They don’t pay you for your support. You’re still on the team. The FBI paid two guys to plot against Gretchen Whitmer. If you’re an NYT writer then you dutifully publish a bunch of stories presenting these FBI stooges as if they were free agents, and beyond the control of their FBI handlers. You dutifully publish a bunch of stories pushing the line that antifa is a myth and that Andy Ngo deserves whatever happens to him. Like the dutiful foot-soldiers whose job it is to censor Republicans on Twitter and Facebook, you see this as your calling. You’re serving the Democratic Party and it feels good to contribute what you can to the Democratic Party.
IRS officials feel morally justified shopping people’s tax records to a lobby group, assuming that’s how the crime was carried out in this instance. NSA officials feel morally justified putting journalists on the no-fly list and spying on them. Adam Schiff feels morally justified spying on his colleague Devin Nunes and on the journalist John Solomon.
You can explain all this without treating each example as its own special creation. It’s all the same eco-system. People abuse their powers and they’re lauded for it.
@Weir, I already agree with your complaints against the mainstream media. I don’t understand your complaint against Mir’s explanation of the media. I think Mir’s explanation is very clarifying.