I am afraid that was my reaction to Luigi Zingales,
Inquisitive, daring and influential media outlets willing to take a strong stand against economic power are essential in a competitive capitalist society. They are our defence against crony capitalism.
Pointer from Mark Thoma. Our media outlets dismiss the opponents of the Ex-Im bank or people who want to wind down Freddie and Fannie as Tea Party nut cases. If you want to stop crony capitalism, what we need are fewer influential media outlets and more Tea Party nut cases.
Indeed. The media are putty in the hands of corporate communications depts and the PR industry.
The media are cargo cult crusaders. They tend towards the oppressor-oppressed storytelling device and they believe what they are told about the narrative coalesced around the causes du jour by the accepted authorities.
Appearance of respectability for competing authorities carries weight. They need one David Brooks to balance one person to speak for the left side.
So the job of the Tea Party is to convince a David Brooks or produce one.
I think the long term trend is fragmentation in news sources. For example I get a portion of my daily information diet from here.
Not sure if you literally want more tea party members. It’s hard to support them when their membership includes irrational hateful people. Eg 9/11 truthers, prez is non american muslim, etc.
That may happen in the long-term, but I don’t think it’s a trend. In fact, the trends – as judged by page-view counts and subscriptions – seem to point in exactly the opposite direction of increased centralization in information dissemination and just a last man or two left standing in any particular niche of prestige and subject matter.
Anyway, the old business model is dead. Most of these publications can’t really survive the current market based on sales and ads alone. So the real big trend is for some billionaire patron to take them under his wing. But, “he who pays the piper calls the tune.”
If you take out the New York Times (general, middle-brow), Wall Street Journal (business, middle-brow), USAToday (general, low-brow), Washington Post (Politics and Government, middle-brow), you end up mostly with a few conglomerates based on big local markets and doing a little local reporting but mostly reprinting stories from the big global news-wire services.
People want to synchronize with each other, and the more consolidated the media landscape – the more predictable it is that everyone you care about is also looking at the same space with the same subconscious purpose – the better.
Anyway, most people get their information from TV-news shows, which is slightly more fragmented. But do we see better results, or do we just see ‘the market for confirmation bias’ and people indulging in epistemic closure? This kind of competition is a double-edged sword.
Network news TV ratings are at 40-50% of peak. Newspaper advertising revenue is also at 40-50% of peak. I’m getting this from journalism.org and statista.com.
It’s common today for people to get news from facebook, reddit, and twitter. Those sites don’t produce content, users post content from all over and discuss in the comments.
Personally I read my blogs on feedly every morning and a set of subreddits. If I hear about an event I’ll check google news and reddit and in extreme cases, twitter.
The content I look for is from thought leaders: what does Nate Silver think about this? Arnold Kling? Etc.
On any given blog/subreddit, there is some debate but also a lot of confirmation bias.
I think you are basically describing what life is like for us voracious internet infovores, but I think we are a tiny minority in the scheme of things.
Maybe something like Gini coefficients or HHI concentration indices would tell us some more about the current landscape.
If you want anything effective, it would not be the uninfluential Tea party, which while it can win some elections, can’t do anything more.
I don’t think elections are what would be important about the Tea Party (Or Occupy the 1% or whatever). More emphasis funneled into two-party politics may not be likely to increase truth and transparency.
The Democratic Party includes quite a few 9/11 truthers, according to polls. I’ve never heard of people identifying with the Tea Party engaging in 9/11 trutherism, though, but perhaps I’m not fully informed. As to the current president’s religion, I agree he’s not a Muslim, but I can see how people could be confused, given that he sees it as his job to do public relations for Islam.
Indeed we cannot count on the media, who are enablers of much crony capitalism whether they realize it or not.
What we need are more think tanks representing the interests of diffuse groups such as taxpayers, to name an obvious example (as opposed to special interest groups, which have no trouble organizing and rent-seeking).
To be fair, maybe American media is better than the Italian media (Zingales is Italian I think) at revealing some forms of crony capitalism.
A “special interest group” is, of course, a group to which I don’t belong. Since I’m paying off a mortgage and have minor children, it’s obvious that the mortgage-interest deduction and the dependent-child tax credit are not special favors accorded to special-interest groups.
I can’t access the full article, but is Zingales saying we actually have “Inquisitive, daring and influential media outlets”? One can argue that such outlets do indeed provide a defense against crony capitalism, but that we don’t actually have them. Or maybe what qualifies are really not the formal media outlets but the bloggers et al.? Again, I can’t access the full article, so please correct if wrong.
For another charitable reading, he also didn’t say “better regulators/regulation are our defense against crony capitalism.”
“Inquisitive, daring and influential media outlets willing to take a strong stand against economic power…”
My impression is that we have a lot of media outlets for whom this mostly means stuff like beating up on the Koch Brothers for being too politically active and haranguing various tech companies, collectively or individually, for not employing more women and minorities. In other words, their priorities are not Zingales’ priorities, unfortunately.
It’s not the media – never has been. It’s the audience.
My question which also relates to politicians and voters as always is “What about when they are lying?”
If you have two graduates in journalism, and one had an IQ thirty points higher than the other, which one writes copy and which one works for a politician?
The problem with “the media” is that much smarter journalists have figured out how to play them to get an organized message distributed. Left or right, the smart specialists are two steps ahead of the hacks.