One sector so far undiscussed is the free press. This sector has difficulties, for while everyone is guaranteed free speech, there are no guarantees of free access to the necessary machinery of a free press. Thus, there is a required intrusion of the private sector, which is the constructor of things, into the sector of news.
First, we should give a purpose for the sector of the press, and that is the delivery of news to the citizenry for its use in the everyday and long term conduct of lives. Necessarily, fees are charged, but because of the achievement of scale in the collection and dispersal of the news, the prices are rarely onerous; audiences of specialized publications may find their pocketbooks taxed, but for the general consumer, the price of information is almost free in this age.
But the achievement of scale comes via the use of things, prosaic and specialized: vehicles, printing presses, journalistic skills, the Internet. These are necessary and thus we cannot preclude the intrusion of the private sector into the free press sector.
The vigor of the free press can be said to correlate with the perception of veracity, and can apply to various players within the sector as well as the whole. Consider the interests of the consumer: false information used as input for decision-making processes will, more often than not, lead to suboptimal solutions. This dry, academic phrase can imply actions like driving off cliffs, losing retirement accounts to shysters, and even worse results. Don’t blow it off: false information is a negative survival strategy. Therefore, if the free press – or some segment of it – is providing false information on a systematic basis, then public trust in that institution will weaken, and that impacts both the organization and the sector1. The currency of the free press sector is the trust the public places in it, and nothing else.
The private sector does not necessarily hold veracity as a highest ideal, neither theoretically (all they want to do is produce and sell goods and services, and honesty is not necessary to make that sale to the consumer) nor in practice (consider the moral outrage of the denial of the tobacco-lung cancer connection by Big Tobacco): the goal is to make and trade things to others. This is not the goal of the free press. Thus, the private sector processes must be considered to be inappropriate until proven otherwise.
It’s worth explicating a little further: while pursuing private sector (or other sector) objectives in the free press sector isn’t necessarily impossible, using inappropriate processes such as disseminating false information will lead to short-term success but, as the consumers learn to distrust the compromised institutions, long-term weakness and even failure as consumers abandon the institution(s) in question.
Given the requirement of some private sector intrusion, how do we currently attempt to firewall that operationality to only positive uses in terms of the robustness of the free press sector? In a phrase, journalistic ethics. Wikipedia provides a useful summary:
While various existing codes have some differences, most share common elements including the principles of—truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and public accountability—as these apply to the acquisition of newsworthy information and its subsequent dissemination to the public.
An explicit acknowledgement of the importance of previously noted requirements for the sector to flourish. Through an implementation of these requirements, both on an individual level and through the concept of “editorial independence”, wherein the advertising section of the organization is asserted to have no influence over the news and editorial sections of the organization, the influence of private sector preferences is obviated and the attentive consumer of the free press’ offerings, that being information, can have a better hope of receiving information congruent with reality. Contrariwise, the breaching of this wall is the private sector leaching beyond prudency into the purview of the free press.
A marvelous example of this (h/t Steve Yelvington) is discussed in this Facebook post by Steve Majerus-Collins. Steve, explaining why he is quitting his job, puts it best:
I work for a man, Michael Schroeder, who in 2009 bought the small daily that has employed me for two decades at a time when the future of The Bristol Press looked dim. He came in promising to shatter old ways and to help push the financially troubled paper to new heights. As is so frequently the case with newspaper publishers, his rhetoric didn’t mean much. By 2011, my wife – a superb fellow reporter who’d been at my side the whole time – quit in disgust after Mr. Schroeder cut a deal with a major advertiser, the local hospital, to keep a damaging news story under wraps. Because she could not let the community know the local hospital had fired all of its emergency room physicians, my wife, Jackie Majerus, handed in her resignation. It means very little to be a reporter if you cannot report the news. I stayed on, though, continuing to write about government and politics, because we could not get by without any paycheck. …
I have watched in recent days as Mr. Schroeder has emerged as a spokesman for a billionaire with a penchant for politics who secretly purchased a Las Vegas newspaper and is already moving to gut it. I have learned with horror that my boss shoveled a story into my newspaper – a terrible, plagiarized piece of garbage about the court system – and then stuck his own fake byline on it. I admit I never saw the piece until recently, but when I did, I knew it had Mr. Schroeder’s fingerprints all over it. Yet when enterprising reporters asked my boss about it, he claimed to know nothing or told them he had no comment. Yesterday, they blew the lid off this idiocy completely, proving that Mr. Schroeder lied, that he submitted a plagiarized story, bypassed what editing exists and basically used the pages of my newspaper, secretly, to further the political agenda of his master out in Las Vegas. In sum, the owner of my paper is guilty of journalistic misconduct of epic proportions.
There is no excusing this behavior. A newspaper editor cannot be allowed to stamp on the most basic rules of journalism and pay no price. He should be shunned by my colleagues, cut off by professional organizations and told to pound sand by anyone working for him who has integrity.
So I quit.
Note that his boss probably thinks he did nothing wrong. Unfortunately, his goal is not consonant with the free press sector goals. He should not be permitted to own the newspaper, as he has violated, in gross fashion, the primary rule for a robust free press. My hope is that the more robust institutions will proceed to take subscribers away until the paper which he bought goes under. Steve’s salutation is admirable but incomplete:
Whatever happens, I am going to hold my head high and face the future with resolve. Journalism is nothing if we reporters falter and fade. We are doing something important and men such Mr. Schroeder and Mr. Adelson – no matter how much money they can toss around – cannot have their way with us.
I would suggest that an American society lacking a robust free press would be unstable and, ultimately, fail.
So that brings us to Bruce Bartlett (with a h/t to Sydney Sweitzer). Mr. Bartlett is a conservative historian who worked for the Reagan and Bush I administrations in the area of economics. His recent release of an article summarizing a collection of studies of Fox News is instructive not only for the information – but for the fact that, as a conservative, he has little use for Fox News. This article gives a handy history and psychological warfare insight into how the angry conservative movement, fragmentary at the start, was co-opted by Fox News and some collaborators. For example:
Limbaugh’s move was fortuitous. At the exact moment he launched his show, the AM band on the radio dial was essentially dying. Since the late 1960s, music programming and listeners had deserted AM radio in droves. The FM dial provided a better signal and could broadcast in stereo, which became increasingly important as musical styles changed. Unable to compete by broadcasting music, AM stations searched for alternative programming. Talk proved to be very viable. Soon there were talkers across the AM dial, many expressing a conservative viewpoint.
There are many reasons why conservative talk radio worked so well. One is that conservatives finally had a news source that fed their philosophy. Another is that conservatives viewed themselves as outsiders and were attracted not only to the philosophy of conservative talk radio, but its tone and articulation of outrage toward liberals that many listeners themselves had long felt.
But hard results? Here’s one:
A follow-up study in 2010 questioned people about misperceptions related to domestic issues.
Again, Fox viewers were more likely to be misinformed and hold incorrect views than those primarily getting their information elsewhere. As the study found:
Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that:
• most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (8 points more likely)
• most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)
• the economy is getting worse (26 points)
• most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)
• the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)
• their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)
• the auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)
• when TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)
• and that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)These effects increased incrementally with increasing levels of exposure and all were statistically significant. The effect was also not simply a function of partisan bias, as people who voted Democratic and watched Fox News were also more likely to have such misinformation than those who did not watch it – though by a lesser margin than those who voted Republican.
There’s more, which I’ll forebear quoting as Mr. Bartlett’s paper deserves to be read in full by the interested reader. I’ll simply note that Republican shock at losing the last two Presidential elections was widespread and should have led to hard questions being asked about the veracity of their sources of information. Instead, reportedly questions were raised about the purity of the various candidates, and the GOP moved further right.
At this juncture, it’s fair to wonder: what are the goals of those in control of the Fox News organization? Why, in a society which must, in the end, value honesty over ideology, is this organization permitted to indulge in a style of reporting which cripples its audience, while its allies work hard to ensure the audience never double checks the information and uses its critical faculties? Does it commit suicide purposefully?
More generally, the intrusion of private sector methodologies into the sector of the free press, which is a long running tension, is a matter for constant monitoring and management. It’s quite one thing for manufacturers of printing presses to compete to build cheaper, better presses; it’s quite another for the more devious strategies of the private sector to be employed in the free press sector to achieve goals peculiar to the private sector – or even the political sector.
1 The use of the financial position of a free press organization as a measure of its health is an intellectual error in that this would be the use of a private sector operationality to evaluate a free press organization (or the whole sector). William Randolph Hearst may have been a very rich man, but his publications are notorious, rather than famous, and are worthy of study only for his pioneering efforts in manipulation of public opinion – not for his honorable intentions.
