Bad News

If there's any doubt that Richard Posner is one of America's most indispensible public intellectuals, his essay in this week's Times Book Review should dispel it. Posner expertly untangles the issues surrounding the decline in both the reputation and the audience of the mainstream media (or MSM in blogger parlance), and he does so with a shrewd cost-based analysis. It is not fundamental biases or the general coarsening of our public discourse that have degraded the news media's reputation, but shifting cost structures. In short, given the declining costs of putting out a newspaper of producing a news broadcast, media outlets can turn a profit with a smaller audience. That in turn leads them to abandon their longstanding attempts to capture the elusive middle ground, making it inevitable that they will be more niche-oriented, more partisan, and more polarized. And increased polarization explains the most curious aspect of the current media wars -- both liberals and conservatives feel the other side is biased against it.

The proliferation of media outlets means the market is more competitive, and markets being what they are, more options means a greater likelihood that consumers will have their needs catered to. Those needs, the evidence suggests, is less for informed commentary than for entertainment and for validation of pre-existing prejudices. Hence, Fox News. Or blogs.

Journalists accuse bloggers of having lowered standards. But their real concern is less high-minded - it is the threat that bloggers, who are mostly amateurs, pose to professional journalists and their principal employers, the conventional news media. A serious newspaper, like The Times, is a large, hierarchical commercial enterprise that interposes layers of review, revision and correction between the reporter and the published report and that to finance its large staff depends on advertising revenues and hence on the good will of advertisers and (because advertising revenues depend to a great extent on circulation) readers. These dependences constrain a newspaper in a variety of ways. But in addition, with its reputation heavily invested in accuracy, so that every serious error is a potential scandal, a newspaper not only has to delay publication of many stories to permit adequate checking but also has to institute rules for avoiding error - like requiring more than a single source for a story or limiting its reporters' reliance on anonymous sources - that cost it many scoops.

Blogs don't have these worries. Their only cost is the time of the blogger, and that cost may actually be negative if the blogger can use the publicity that he obtains from blogging to generate lecture fees and book royalties. Having no staff, the blogger is not expected to be accurate. Having no advertisers (though this is changing), he has no reason to pull his punches. And not needing a large circulation to cover costs, he can target a segment of the reading public much narrower than a newspaper or a television news channel could aim for. He may even be able to pry that segment away from the conventional media. Blogs pick off the mainstream media's customers one by one, as it were.

Posner also makes quick work of the most frequent criticism of blogs, that they play fast and loose with the facts:

The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances is obtuse. The blogosphere has more checks and balances than the conventional media; only they are different. The model is Friedrich Hayek's classic analysis of how the economic market pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants.

In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise - not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs. It's as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising.