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- Sep 25, 2007
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- 201
Hi all,
This is an article from the November 1st - 7th edition of The Economist. Excerpts:
Bias can be thought of as a supply-side phenomenon that arises from ideology. Owners` or employees` political views will determine how a newspaper or channel slants its coverage of a piece of news. But this does not square with the assumption that readers and viewers value accuracy. If so, then competition should hurt media outlets that systematically distort the news (in any direction). The brouhaha about bias in America, as free a media market as any, suggests something else is going on.
Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer, two Harvard economists, argued in an influential paper that it may be naive to think that people care about accuracy alone. Instead, they modelled the consequences of assuming that newspaper readers also like to have their beliefs confirmed by what they read. As long as readers have different beliefs, the Mullainathan-Shleifer model suggests that competition, far from driving biased reporting out of the market, would encourage newspapers to cater to the biases of different segments of the reading public.
None of this is particularly helpful to seekers of the unvarnished truth. These conscientious sorts still have to find the time to read lots of newspapers to get an unbiased picture of the world. But by serving demand from a variety of political niches, competition does allow for different points of view to be represented.
http://www.economist.com/finance/economics...ory_id=12510893
Keith
This is an article from the November 1st - 7th edition of The Economist. Excerpts:
Bias can be thought of as a supply-side phenomenon that arises from ideology. Owners` or employees` political views will determine how a newspaper or channel slants its coverage of a piece of news. But this does not square with the assumption that readers and viewers value accuracy. If so, then competition should hurt media outlets that systematically distort the news (in any direction). The brouhaha about bias in America, as free a media market as any, suggests something else is going on.
Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer, two Harvard economists, argued in an influential paper that it may be naive to think that people care about accuracy alone. Instead, they modelled the consequences of assuming that newspaper readers also like to have their beliefs confirmed by what they read. As long as readers have different beliefs, the Mullainathan-Shleifer model suggests that competition, far from driving biased reporting out of the market, would encourage newspapers to cater to the biases of different segments of the reading public.
None of this is particularly helpful to seekers of the unvarnished truth. These conscientious sorts still have to find the time to read lots of newspapers to get an unbiased picture of the world. But by serving demand from a variety of political niches, competition does allow for different points of view to be represented.
http://www.economist.com/finance/economics...ory_id=12510893
Keith