Waxing Libertarian

Kevin Drum says those of us who like to complain about the trouble with objectivity need to check ourselves:

The problem with the convention of objectivity isn't that no one recognizes that it's a problem. Everyone recognizes that it's a problem. Entire tank cars of ink have been spilled discussing it. The real problem is that so far no one has come up with a solution — a practical, functional, real-world solution — that's broadly acceptable. Any ideas?

One observation is that I think it's simply false that everyone recognizes it's a problem. Everyone pays lip service to the idea of recognizing that there's a problem here, but I think your average major American news organization believes it is doing an excellent job of covering US politics when it is not, in fact, doing an excellent job.

The solution, at any rate, is pretty clear to me: market competition. There isn't a procedural rule that will correctly identify the right level of editorializing and the correct person to write the stories. Rather, as we move toward a world where the internet provides consumers with a large degree of choice, managers and reporters who manage to consistently cover the news in a way that people find useful will prosper, while those who fail to do so will suffer. Ask a journalist about the objectivity convention that governs US newspapers and he'll tell you a story about the vital role a neutral press plays in sustaining a vibrant democracy. It's an intriguing story, but if you ask an economist about the optimal strategy for a media organization in a market with few competitors, he'll tell you that the important thing is to be bland and inoffensive, like television before there was cable. Not coincidentally, America's newspapers have, secure in their possession of local monopolies, gotten really good at being bland and inoffensive. I'm reasonably optimistic that in the emerging, more-competitive world, new approaches will emerge.

Comments

Alternatively, niche markets. It seems quite possible that there might be subgroups in America who so disagree on basic issues--is the right to a fair hearing an important right for an American, for example--that easy consensus facts are not possible. So what? Let them have their own papers, but that shouldn't require the ruin of ours. But it means accepting that a paper might not be THE paper for everyone.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | August 12, 2007 6:56 PM

Isn't Fox News the result of precisely the process you describe?

Posted by TheObjectiveOne | August 12, 2007 7:00 PM

Well, newspapers used to have gobs of competition. Major cities, and mid-major cities, had several different print news options. Then, the "market" determined that competition wasn't so great, and what was really great was no competition, and they all merged / got bought / disbanded. So now we have newspapers with little to no competition, and we get a newsmedia that relates a particular corporatist spin on the news.

If the Internet manages to provide competition, in all likelihood very soon after that it will get merged into large, corporatist entities.

What there needs to be, then, is massive government legislation, based on the notion that competition in news is a societal good, to ensure that people have multiple competing news sources, for different regions and for different topics.

The problem with this post is the uncritical futurism which is typical of libertarian thought - as if a problem that has come to be can be solved by imagining a future in which the same situation will be avoided (though, of course, without imagining the means by which it will be avoided). Lack of competition in news will only happen if we make sure that competition exists - we don't get to point to the future and say it'll be ok somehow.

Posted by DivGuy | August 12, 2007 7:06 PM

The solution, at any rate, is pretty clear to me: market competition.

I think we have a market failure in this case, e.g. Rush Limbuagh & FAUX News.

Posted by Steve J. | August 12, 2007 7:32 PM

Google is in the process of allowing the subjects of new stories to respond to the story in the story itself through a new type of comments section.

That's a positive step, I think. While obviously the subjects of these stories will have agendas, those agendas are going to obvious to the reader. Meanwhile, it allows push-back on the half-truths and spin that can bias stories.

Posted by mope | August 12, 2007 7:33 PM

MY wrote:
> I'm reasonably optimistic that in the
> emerging, more-competitive world, new
> approaches will emerge.

Really, what do you know, and why should we put any value into your opinion? You're just a kid -- what are you, 24 years old? You know nothing -- you have lived very little, and what you have lived has been quite coddled. Go out and get some experience -- travel around the world, move to Omaha, take a job as a garbageman -- do something, ANYTHING, do show that you are not just another spoiled rich boy. Because as you are now, we have absolutely no reason to trust anything you have to say, so inexperienced and childish are you....

Posted by Janni | August 12, 2007 7:40 PM

Kevin Drum says that if a reporter given 'handout' info injects more info that the handout was a lie, or contradicts previous info, that the reporter has become an opinionator.

The easy cure is that media adopt as the regular course of business that all info (especially government, special interest, or anonymous handouts) contain a graf or three labelled 'fact checking' where the liar or spinner is brought to journalistic justice. Why don't they do this routinely?

That would truly be fair and balanced, but require to the reporter to do more than stenography - they'd have to do some research homework.

Posted by JimPortandOR | August 12, 2007 8:00 PM

Two thoughts-- (1) what everyone else said about Fox. Doubtlessly, market factors will affect where we wind up; but unless you believe in free market fairies (or, more charitably, are unaware of the concepts of market failure or multiple equilibria), there's no reason to assume that maximum profits = maximum merit. Brittney Spears outsells things that are better. News is, after all, merely one output of corporations that deliver many kinds of entertainment.

(2) It's not about "editorializing," it's about providing useful facts and context. Like that AFP article on Bush and Iran-- no editorializing, just, you know, facts.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | August 12, 2007 8:00 PM

Because as you are now, we have absolutely no reason to trust anything you have to say,

Trust? Who said we're supposed to "trust" any blogger, pundit or commentator? Matt laid out his argument; you can agree or disagree.

Posted by Freedom! | August 12, 2007 8:12 PM

) what everyone else said about Fox.

I disagree, I think. I don't like Fox, but a lot of people do. And the truthiness of Fox speaks to them; I don't know why they should be forced to understand the news in the same way that I or you might. I see a market success. The problem comes when we pretend that Fox is equivalent to CNN or other, I think.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | August 12, 2007 8:16 PM

I think most of the commenters are all over the problem of competition producing an individuated concept of "news" that pushes people into echo chambers of their own creation. Cass Sunstein has written some interesting articles about this problem. For example, see: http://www.bostonreview.net/BR26.3/sunstein.html

This quote from that article, I think, is important to ponder:

"...a risk with a system of perfect individual control is that it can reduce the importance of the "public sphere" and of common spaces in general. One of the important features of such spaces is that they tend to ensure that people will encounter materials on important issues, whether or not they have specifically chosen the encounter. When people see materials that they have not chosen, their interests and their views might change as a result. At the very least, they will know a bit more about what their fellow citizens are thinking."

Posted by Unreal Veal | August 12, 2007 8:19 PM

Janni, if you're so mature and experienced, why don't you actually offer some sort of argument on the issue at hand?

Posted by Reality Man | August 12, 2007 8:19 PM

Because as you are now, we have absolutely no reason to trust anything you have to say, so inexperienced and childish are you....

I call bullshit. Matt has a 5-year record as a high profile blogger, which is ample to judge his credibility (pretty darn good). He's been right a lot more than he's wrong, and when he's been wrong (e. g., Iraq, initially), he's been quick to acknowledge and correct his mistakes.

Posted by rea | August 12, 2007 8:24 PM

Shut up meathead! Get off my lawn!

Posted by Janni | August 12, 2007 8:42 PM

"Everyone recognizes that it's a problem"

My God, what planet is he living on.

That is high-level liberal discussion on the web.

Posted by Andruw | August 12, 2007 8:48 PM

"The easy cure is that media adopt as the regular course of business that all info (especially government, special interest, or anonymous handouts) contain a graf or three labelled 'fact checking' where the liar or spinner is brought to journalistic justice. Why don't they do this routinely?"

Because that's how the journalists themselves lie, while retaining deniablity: By finding a liar who's telling the lie the journalist wants told, and then accurately quoting them without warning the reader that they're quoting a lie. Why would the journalistic community have any interest in losing this handy technique?

Posted by Brett Bellmore | August 12, 2007 9:01 PM

I'm not as confident as Matt.
It would be great to have reliable news sources - what used to be called newspapers of record - that would be not flawless but generally pretty reliable about the facts. The problem, as we all know, is that news sources that uncritically repeat BS from politicians fall well short of this goal. But a profusion of new sources, with various degrees of editorial content mixed in, is likely to move us farther away.
It's very hard to make a rational policy choice when everyone has their own facts. In 2004 70+ percent of Bush voters knew that Saddam was behind 9/11 and that we had found stockpiles of WMD in Iraq.
The solution is simple, but I don't see any mechanism or any incentives to get us there. Journalists just have to stop doing such a crappy job. When a reporter brings in a story, the editor needs to say - "I know that's what Bush said, but is it true?" The AFP story Matt quoted recently should be the norm. But beyond all of us making noise, I don't see any way to move things in that direction. What percent of Times readers are going to say, I've seen too many inferior Gordon stories - cancel my subscription?

Posted by peter | August 12, 2007 9:12 PM

Matt, if you know so much about what American is supposed to do, why haven't you joined the government, or better yet, the Marines? Afraid?

Posted by Jenny | August 12, 2007 9:22 PM

The thing is that in a free market the buyers want to buy they want. Some want FOX some want Pacifica some want redstate.com, so that's what people sell. There is this huge market for information that matches what you all ready believe. But that huge is reletive. Most people don't pay attention to the news at all. Most people get their political news from rumors that reletives and coworkers pass on to them. Rumors such as the need to refom the tort system, or Hillary Clinton killing Vince Foster or Al Gore being a serial liar (which guilanni appears to actually be). These rumors are created for political gain and they are amplified by the practices of the mainstream media, but the real problem is that a huge chunk of our public is totally uneducated (and uninterested) in politics. I think a conscientious mainstream journalists might attmept to reach these people using the methods of political operatives, but even that is probelmatic. Perhaps we need a philosopher king.

Posted by cw | August 12, 2007 9:31 PM

Markets are great at selling what people want, terrible at making people want what they need. The "marketplace of ideas" will gladly sell "the controversy" rather than the hard information that much of what people belive is false. Eventually the truth will out, but eventually can be after years, decades or even centuries.

Like the Scientific Method, objectivity is a way of thinking that must be taught, not a commodity that can be sold.

Posted by cpl | August 12, 2007 9:41 PM

I'm reasonably positive that the net will provide lots of outlets for good reporting for anyone that's willing to look for it. It already does to a large degree.

However it's not the hard core political junkies and news hounds we should be worrying about. What's important is the political slant of the organizations that have the best marketing department and have the most extensive coverage on missing white women. That's where 80% of the population is going to end up getting their political coverage because they're NOT looking for the best political coverage. It doesn't matter how good or bad it is, just that it doesn't offend the viewers.

I don't have any reason to believe the quality of those organizations political coverage going to get any better. If anything, I expect it to get worse.

Posted by DJ | August 12, 2007 9:44 PM

". . . in the emerging, more-competitive world . . ."

Well, that certainly is an optimistic view.

Is it realistic?

News production and distribution are subject to serious economic problems, with regard to production and distribution, which makes it rather difficult to concentrate resources necessary for production, and rather easy to squander resources in redundant (read: competitive) distribution.

Advertising-support carries its own contagion, while undermining competing business models. (It is hard to compete with "free"; ask Netscape.)

Posted by Bruce Wilder | August 12, 2007 9:46 PM

"Perhaps we need a philosopher king."

naw, what we need are genetic/computer implants implanted in our brains. really.

Posted by Korha | August 12, 2007 9:48 PM

"naw, what we need are genetic/computer implants implanted in our brains. really."

...to help us think good thoughts.

Posted by cw | August 12, 2007 9:55 PM

Good faith.

Objectivity is impossible, but that doesn't mean that a good faith effort to approach objectivity is without value.

A market for information may be helpful, but it isn't a solution in itself. If there is no ethic of good faith, the market can easily end up generating more infotainment and self-reinforcing wish-fulfillment.

The problem is that most people have taken the arguments that objectivity is impossible to mean that attempting objectivity is fruitless.

Posted by Leo | August 12, 2007 9:56 PM

Rather, as we move toward a world where the internet provides consumers with a large degree of choice, managers and reporters who manage to consistently cover the news in a way that people find useful will prosper, while those who fail to do so will suffer.

If by "people find useful" you mean "telling them what they want to hear" then you're correct.

Posted by daveNYC | August 12, 2007 10:04 PM

the market can easily end up generating more infotainment and self-reinforcing wish-fulfillment.

So what? I think the weakish claim is that either good information and the characteristics that lead to it are useful or they aren't. If good information is useful, people will sort that out because it will be beneficial for them to do so. If it isn't useful, why shouldn't they have infotainment?

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | August 12, 2007 10:07 PM

I wrote a post about this, but I'll give the short version here.

Our news sources won't stop putting our bad material until people show that they can distinguish between good and bad, and that they care. If the internet doesn't change the customers' wants, it won't change the way news is produced. So why think things will be very different in the future?

Posted by Justin | August 13, 2007 12:09 AM

"If good information is useful, people will sort that out because it will be beneficial for them to do so. If it isn't useful, why shouldn't they have infotainment?"

It would have been very beneficial to the american public if they had sought out "good information" about who was behind 9/11 and about the situation in pre-invasion Iraq. Many lives and mucho dineros would have been saved if the american public got (or was interested in) a complete and honest assessment of the situation. It would be very beneficial for us if we would seek out a complete and honest assessment of the new FISA bill just passsed.

The reality is not that people are delivered good information and then they decide if it's beneficial to them. It's more like the people are delivered (and were talking politics here) a whole smorgesborg of information, most of it crap. And most people don't care anyway. It's really hard wading through the rivers of information to pick out the good from the bad when your interested. It's imposible when you don't even care.

Posted by cw | August 13, 2007 12:22 AM

We should be so lucky as to have mere bland neutrality from the news. Bland neutrality would be great compared to what we've got.

Posted by ferd | August 13, 2007 12:38 AM

The problem with relying on the market is that you have to pay attention to who's buying and who's selling. Most or all of the costs are paid for by advertisers, not readers, so when a paper is motivated to be inoffensive, it is the advertisers that they can't offend. A local newspaper can't afford to offend the local chamber of commerce, but it most certainly can afford to offend other groups that aren't as likely to advertise.

Posted by Joe Buck | August 13, 2007 1:51 AM

The real problem is that so far no one has come up with a solution — a practical, functional, real-world solution — that's broadly acceptable.

It may not be easy to define an all-encompassing definition of "objectivity". However, you often know it when you see it.

For example:

If you spend significant column inches on Hillary Clinton being a "cold fish" - you're not being objective.

If you write multiple columns about John Edwards being a "phony". You aren't being objective.

Similarly if you describe a candidate as "strong on defense" you really need to provide an example. If it includes a readiness to nuke other countries you should explain why that isn't simply jingoistic.

Adjectives like "serious", "experienced", "pragmatic" and particularly "presidential" should be defined with specific examples or removed completely.

Posted by Jinchi | August 13, 2007 3:01 AM

It would be great to have reliable news sources - what used to be called newspapers of record - that would be not flawless but generally pretty reliable about the facts.

The problem these days is that we are neither here nor there. You may not have liked it, but, despite the bias of the old 'broadcast', liberal, consensus days, the press was altogether what it was: an elite. News was definitely a business, but not strictly a business; the 'important' press was the only game in town, and so had the luxury of standing up to Interest now and then, because it was itself an Interest. I'm not as sanguine about the Future as is MY, but it seems to me that we need to have mostly all one thing or mostly all the other. If everything has to be utterly market based - because a political consensus, once destroyed, can't easily be put back together - then we better get on with it. What we have at the moment is the worst of both worlds: a wholey market driven elite, aka horseshit galore.

A really market-based, and broad-based, press, via the internet, would be the waning conservative 'revolution's' worst nightmare. Their nemesis was always the liberal consensus of the 60s and the press attendent thereto, and that was about it. Notwithstanding all the think-tanking etc., there never was much of a theory of anything behind their 'revolution'; it was all about simply replacing the extant elites with their own elites. Too bad for them that what success they've had with that is not going to last much longer.

Posted by jonnybutter | August 13, 2007 3:03 AM

One of the problems in the television and print media is consolidation. Too few people control too much. Even with the best of intentions, the views of a small number of editors and publishers affect most of the news.

Another is the (for lack of a better word) incestuous relationships between members of the media. The same people write articles and then go on television. They interview each other or comment on what each other is saying. They spend so much time together they forget that they aren't "average" people.

One big problem specific to television is anything that doesn't have video footage doesn't exist.

But is the "free market" the solution? Not necessarily. There is not guarantee that people will read or watch journalists who tell them what they need to hear. Sometimes that lone voice in the wilderness is right and all the "right" voices are wrong.

Journalists need to remember that news is not a "product" and making a profit should not be their primary goal.

Yeah, I'm a starry-eyed idealist. But just because it will never happen doesn't mean it shouldn't be that way.

Posted by myiq2xu | August 13, 2007 3:09 AM

The news media has never been and never will be a source of "objectivity".

The very notion is laughable.

If you go back fifty years, Adolf Hitler rightly criticized the news media (although for him, it was all about the Jewish control.) If you go back further, you find plenty of free thinkers such as the English magician Aleister Crowley who recognized that newspapers were always in favor of "the Establishment" and always jockeyed between Establishment elements for their own benefit.

Even the notion of "objectivity" at all on subjects of emotional significance to humans is ridiculous to even entertain for an instant. Even scientists have trouble maintaining "objectivity" in their fields. If that weren't true, Thomas Kuhn's "paradigm shifts" wouldn't be necessary.

The only "journalist" I ever knew who actually appeared to engage in what a "journalist" is supposed to do, i.e., study a subject in depth without bias and put it into context for the reader, was John A. Keel, a columnist and more or less freelance reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

And his primary expertise was in UFOs. He was the model for Richard Gere's character in the movie "The Mothman Prophecies."

The only way you will ever get "objectivity" is from the rare person who believes in objectivity. Your average reporter - whether newspaper, broadcaster, or blogger - ain't that person. And even if he is, it requires a LOT of work to really get to the bottom of what's really going on and then to organize it in such a way as to provide a comprehensive and correct analysis of it. And then to provide that analysis in a manner useful to someone who is not an expert in the field is also difficult - you can't do it with 30-second "sound bites" and single column inches.

I used to read commentary by the late naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson about "crypto-zoology" events - strange animals. He could pick out a dozen errors of fact in the first few paragraphs of any reporter's story about some unusual animal, based on his knowledge of zoology.

If you want facts and interpretation of facts, go to the people who collect them as a scientific profession - not the people who "report" them.

To people who are experts in a field, there is no measurable difference between Fox News and CNN, or the National Enquirer and the New York Times.

Not to mention that if a reporter exposes someone's lies or mistakes, he's not going to be able to cover that person as a story ever again. And when those people who making the lies and mistakes are the people who RUN this country, what do you expect the news media to do? They're running a business - they need access to the news makers to report news.

Of course, what we really need are "intelligence organizations" that find out and report facts, using any means necessary - not "news organizations." The whole notion of "news" is basically irrelevant. What anybody really wants is "intelligence" that one can use. Maybe someday someone will start such an organization - if they can stay out of jail long enough.

In the meantime, take everything with a grain of salt - only accept something if it is consistent with the rest of what you THINK you know.

And remember the Firesign Theater: "Everything you know is wrong."

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | August 13, 2007 3:36 AM

Just to be clear: I'm not as sanguine as MY might be because I don't think the Market alone is sufficient to counter the avalanche of cheese we're deliciously drowning in now. Some sort of new political consensus is required; let's be honest: at this point we need a reallly remedial kind of consensus, ie, that black isn't white, that modern biology exsists, etc. As we've seen over and over, in the net neutrality wars, spectrum allocation fights etc, entities with lots of money and power are capable of aiding entropy in, ultimately, decisive ways. The libertarian dream of living without some kind of political consensus is just that.

But a political consensus is always essentially provisional - the one in the 50s and 60s certainly was. (If you look at the Dem majority in the FDR-LBJ days, it's pretty obvious that it was hardly 'pure'). Some sort of consensus is nothing to be afraid of. This is a liberal country - a liberal democracy, in fact. The problem with the liberal consensus of that era was not that it was liberal or a consensus, but that it became complacent and therefore rigid.

There is no automatic mechinism, neither the criteria Drum posits, nor the Market.

Posted by jonnybutter | August 13, 2007 3:54 AM

"Isn't Fox News the result of precisely the process you describe?"

I hate fox. but yeah, I can't agree more with the commenter.

Posted by thehova | August 13, 2007 4:23 AM

"Ask a journalist about the objectivity convention that governs US newspapers and he'll tell you a story about the vital role a neutral press plays in sustaining a vibrant democracy."

Ask an American journalist, maybe.

The comments about Fox are missing the point, if you ask me. There are two reasons it seems like such a powerful demonstration of the value of the convention of perceived objectivity, which needn't be the case: a) the establishment has until very recently given it legitimacy as a news organisation it didn't deserve; b) there's no competing "subjective" news channel. A better comparison (for Matt's argument, anyway) would be the UK's newspaper market, where over a dozen papers fight it out on a national basis, on top of the regionals, with little if any pretence at objectivity. Now certainly there are some papers that are as bad, if not worse, than Fox. But there are also many papers that are far better than anything in the US, for day to day political reporting. And the UK isn't alone in this - most western European countries follow this model, largely without the worst excesses of the British tabloids.

I'm not saying the US market will ever resemble the UK - there are far too many cultural and market differences. But there is considerable evidence to support the idea that a "marketplace of ideas" model is superior to a patently absurd convention that trivialises the political discourse and is complicit in deception.

Posted by Ginger Yellow | August 13, 2007 6:01 AM

While there may be no way to write news stories in a systematically objective fashion, I think there is something in the struggle to put one's best efforts into it. There needs to be some normative baseline regarding the publication of news because without one we could reach a point where liberals and conservatives simply couldn't talk to each other about politics any more, not just because they disagree in principle, but because they disagree about the facts as well. Granted, this happens already, but it would become far more widespread if news outlets became punditry outlets by another name.

Posted by Gordon Lightfoot | August 13, 2007 6:40 AM

> One observation is that I think it's simply
> false that everyone recognizes it's a problem.
> Everyone pays lip service to the idea of
> recognizing that there's a problem here, but I
> think your average major American news
> organization believes it is doing an excellent job
> of covering US politics when it is not, in fact,
> doing an excellent job.

Thank you for saying that - it is a point Mr. Drum is steadfastly refusing to admit.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | August 13, 2007 6:55 AM

Used to be that Journalists were supposed to approach each story with the answering of: who? how? when? where? and why? If they applied this to reporting on what people say then in discussing the "why" the Journalists would need to consider the speaker's agenda and also whether or not what is being said is true.

They should just follow their old rules.

Posted by Peter Waksman | August 13, 2007 7:42 AM

"There needs to be some normative baseline regarding the publication of news..."

How about: accurate, informative, relevant and timely?

There absolutely needs to be a normative baseline regarding news, but the current US convention of objectivity isn't it. It's a means of abdicating responsibility to the reader and to the editor(s) who chooses what page to put the story on and what headline to give it. The journalist's responsibility should be to the readers and to the truth, not some arbitrary convention that makes him/her complicit in deception and obfuscation.

Posted by Ginger Yellow | August 13, 2007 8:03 AM

What Ginger said. Further, Fox is not a problem. That everyone on this thread points to Fox suggests that bad behavior does have reputational effects. Perfect.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | August 13, 2007 8:56 AM

Ginger Yellow: What does "accurate" or "informative" mean in the absence of objective standards?

SomeCallMeTim: Fox news has a bad reputation among commentors on a liberal blog in 2007. It's reputation has begun to turn in the mainstream, but it's hardly a pariah. I don't think the country can afford a decade for the market to operate every time someone sets up a propaganda outfit.

Posted by Leo | August 13, 2007 9:18 AM

While main stream news reporting that provides objective analysis of the facts/truth behind the quotes is a long way off, I think a few things can contribute to a better informed public over the long term.
Well informed blog readers need to keep being activist in challenging journalists on sloppy or misleading reporting. My occasional efforts in this have consistently been met with a thoughtful reply from contacted reporter.
I also think blogs/online reporting will continue to lead the way, and part of the solution to better informed public is to expand blog readership. Keep sharing insights (and source of those insights) with less informed family and friends.
My final solution is schools doing more in media literacy, although not much is happening there right now that I see.

Posted by noexpert | August 13, 2007 9:23 AM

"Ginger Yellow: What does "accurate" or "informative" mean in the absence of objective standards?"

I never said there weren't objective standards. British papers, like any others, should be and are judged against them. I'm criticising the convention usually labelled as objectivity, whereby for example the president says something, it gets reported because he said it, and any indication that it might not be true is put explicitly in the mouths of "Democrats" or "administration critics". This happens with even the most basic factual information, as the pleasant surprise of that AFP story on Bush's nonsense about Iran demonstrates. There's almost never any sincere attempt to convey whether or not a given proposition is true.

As for "informative", it's pretty obvious. Does the reader come out of the story knowing more about the subject than before? Does the story clarify or obfuscate the truth? Crucially, this must be true for someone with no knowledge of the subject no matter how far through the story they get. It's Journalism 101: bring the news to the top. One of my main beefs with the US press - one I share with Brad Delong - is the way the major papers (WSJ excepted, ironically enough) consistently bury the lead and use misleading headlines.

Posted by Ginger Yellow | August 13, 2007 11:37 AM

The Internet will and already has helped "objectify" (?) the media by creating checks and balances. People need to develop critical thinking skills and recognize others who are trustworthy. The techonology itself is neutral, so it's up to people to make the best use of it. Of course "special interests" will try to corrupt the Internet thoroughly.

The downside is the anonymous Trolls people have to deal with, like Janni/Jenni, but I comfort myself with thoughts of what losers, away from the computer, they must be. It's a worthwhile tradeoff.

Posted by Peter K. | August 13, 2007 1:54 PM

Not quite sure what it is, but there is something funny about your optimism about free markets and objectivity when, three posts later, you point out how miserably basic scientific fact has failed to convince huge numbers of people in this country.

If the fact that species evolved over time or that the Grand Canyon is millions of years old is controversial, then what chance is there for truths that aren't supported by virtually every scientist on the planet?

Posted by dwin | August 13, 2007 7:24 PM

Waxing libertarians? Where do I sign up?

Posted by cw | August 13, 2007 11:10 PM

dwin: Once again, I'd point you to the fact that in countries without the spurious convention and with "biased" media, higher proportions of the population were right about the war, about Saddam and 9/11 and presumably about the Grand Canyon itself. The current system isn't working. More importantly, it systematically favours intentional deception over truthtelling. It's being gamed left, right and centre by canny politicians, activists and others, and the media doesn't seem to care.

Posted by Ginger Yellow | August 14, 2007 5:52 AM

"Rather, as we move toward a world where the internet provides consumers with a large degree of choice, managers and reporters who manage to consistently cover the news in a way that people find useful will prosper, while those who fail to do so will suffer."

What is "useful" to a reader is quite different than what is accurate. People don't like to doubt themselves constantly. Many would rather simply reinforce biases than examine them, and the market helps them do so. Basically, Ace of Spades is useful to some people, but it does nothing to get us closer to objectivity.

Posted by Robert | August 14, 2007 4:45 PM