All Intensive Purposes

Judge Posner has a worthwhile piece in yesterday's NYT Book Review discussing liberal and conservative complaints about the major media, and explaining why both have their roots in economic phenomena.

Some of Posner's claims are a little odd. For example,

The mainstream media are predominantly liberal - in fact, more liberal than they used to be. But not because the politics of journalists have changed. Rather, because the rise of new media, itself mainly an economic rather than a political phenomenon, has caused polarization, pushing the already liberal media farther left.

What? What's the basis for the assertion that the mainstream media are more liberal than they used to be? More specifically, Posner asserts that in response to Fox News, CNN has moved to the left. This just seems wrong to me, and can only be the observation of a brain addled by too much exposure to Fox.

After I drafted the above, S.S. pointed me to Jack Shafer's critique of the Posner piece on Slate. Shafer rightly whacks Posner for making odd assertions without any support in fact, including the above example:

When Posner declares that media competition has pushed the established press to the left, he gives only one example: Fox News making CNN more liberal. Has Posner lost his cable connection? The success of Fox News convinced CNN of the opposite. CNN realized that the demographic that has the time and interest to watch a lot of cable news tends to be older and more conservative, as this Pew Research Center report indicates. If anything, the one-worldist CNN of founder Ted Turner has been vectoring right in recent years. Lou Dobbs, for one, now blabs a Buchananesque position on trade and immigration five nights a week.

True enough. However, Shafer doesn't give Posner enough credit for bringing something new to the table. Complaints about the media find explanation in economic changes in the media marketplace. E.g., with the internet and 24-hour cablecasting, deadlines are constant, not daily, resulting in a rush to publication that produces more errors, and places a premium on sensationalism. With so many more competing channels, any individual medium must work harder to stand out, and so a sober moderation is not as lucrative now as a distinctive (and even ideological) point of view.

Posner adds:

The argument that competition increases polarization assumes that liberals want to read liberal newspapers and conservatives conservative ones. Natural as that assumption is, it conflicts with one of the points on which left and right agree - that people consume news and opinion in order to become well informed about public issues. Were this true, liberals would read conservative newspapers, and conservatives liberal newspapers, just as scientists test their hypotheses by confronting them with data that may refute them. But that is not how ordinary people (or, for that matter, scientists) approach political and social issues. The issues are too numerous, uncertain and complex, and the benefit to an individual of becoming well informed about them too slight, to invite sustained, disinterested attention. Moreover, people don't like being in a state of doubt, so they look for information that will support rather than undermine their existing beliefs. They're also uncomfortable seeing their beliefs challenged on issues that are bound up with their economic welfare, physical safety or religious and moral views.

So why do people consume news and opinion? In part it is to learn of facts that bear directly and immediately on their lives - hence the greater attention paid to local than to national and international news. They also want to be entertained, and they find scandals, violence, crime, the foibles of celebrities and the antics of the powerful all mightily entertaining. And they want to be confirmed in their beliefs by seeing them echoed and elaborated by more articulate, authoritative and prestigious voices. So they accept, and many relish, a partisan press. Forty-three percent of the respondents in the poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center thought it "a good thing if some news organizations have a decidedly political point of view in their coverage of the news."

Being profit-driven, the media respond to the actual demands of their audience rather than to the idealized "thirst for knowledge" demand posited by public intellectuals and deans of journalism schools. They serve up what the consumer wants, and the more intense the competitive pressure, the better they do it. We see this in the media's coverage of political campaigns. Relatively little attention is paid to issues. Fundamental questions, like the actual difference in policies that might result if one candidate rather than the other won, get little play. The focus instead is on who's ahead, viewed as a function of campaign tactics, which are meticulously reported. Candidates' statements are evaluated not for their truth but for their adroitness; it is assumed, without a hint of embarrassment, that a political candidate who levels with voters disqualifies himself from being taken seriously, like a racehorse that tries to hug the outside of the track. News coverage of a political campaign is oriented to a public that enjoys competitive sports, not to one that is civic-minded.

This sounds right to, but it seems to lead directly to a few questions that Posner does not reach. If participants in the media market cannot be trusted to inform themselves, and instead seek out information that ratifies their pre-existing beliefs, are they to be trusted to do a sound job as citizens? Does this not suggest that there is some form of market failure, at least insofar as we rely on this market to ensure that our democracy functions? And when he discusses Fox and CNN, Posner appears to assume that CNN would move to the left because there's a viable market niche there. But what if the left doesn't have the money that advertisers want? Is there not a real risk that these markets will supply more of the information that the right demands than that which the left demands? These are tough questions.

But Posner does not want to go there, presumably because The New York Times Book Review was not paying him to do so.