Richard Posner strokes the metaphorical beard. And belches a few lies.
So many so that I sent the following letter to the New York Times Public Editor.
When you first came on board the New York Times you asked for "thoughtful" discussion. I was suspicious, my own knowledge of Southwestern Missouri and the Wall Street Journal, as well as the bias of your predecessor, lead me to believe that this was a synonym for trafficking in dishonesty. Doubts, however, well founded, are not data.
You ask for thoughtful input, however, it is difficult to give thoughtful input when work so lacking in honesty as Richard Posner's long piece in today's New York Times Magazine are published. It is riddled with errors of basic fact and discipline, for example, anyone submitting a marketing plan for a "more liberal" outlet would be laughed at, as Air America was laughed at. It is not old outlets that will move to the left, it is new outlets that will take to the extremes, as the old ones try and hold on to the center.
An analysis of radio stations shows that his basic economic argument, that lower start up costs lead to the possibility of being more liberal, is at variance with the experience of religious radio and independent televisions stations, both of which lean heavily to the right.
In the medium where I am regarded, by at least some, as an expert, his analysis that lowered costs lean left is so incorrect as to be laughable. It is the right, not the left, that adopted blogging first. It is only recently that the total circulation of left blogs out numbered that of right blogs, both in the top end of the curve, and in the top 90% of blogs as measured by Truth Laid Bear (itself a right wing blog, which established the rating system for blogs). There are still more total right wing blogs than left wing blogs.
In short, the entire piece is based on assertion about media economics which would fail any class on micro-media. Micro-media leans right, not left. This is not an ideological decision, but a matter of the self-identification of those people who seek out micro-media.The entire piece reads, in fact, as one long screed, a repetition of the assertion that the country has polarized to the liberal side, and that good honest conservatives like Posner are merely trying to promote balance.
The piece is propaganda because its ignores basic facts. Media outlets have not moved left, but right, over the last generation. Since the public as a whole has moved right over the last generation, this isn't surprising. More importantly, since the center now sees itself as being at least as much aligned with the right on basic issues as with the left, there are more and more cases where liberals are in the minority on particular positions. None of these things are surprising, no side of the ideological spectrum is always right, or can expect to always be in the majority. The irony of having the New York Times feature 1964's paper versus today's is amusing. Would a judge who declared the constitutional basis of the New Deal as fundamentally unsound have been treated so well in 1964? You and I both know better. The only place where the New York Times of 2005 is more "liberal" is that the repetition of the word "man" for "human" wouldn't pass the style check.
However, since the New York Times insists on printing long featured pieces which are based, as noted, on non-facts, but on assertions which are overturned by an examination of the real numbers - something that Judge Posner disdained to do for his piece - it can only create an atmosphere where "thoughtful" discussion is seen is pointless. What point is there in holding a discussion, when I am absolutely sure, given the New York Times unbroken track record over the last decade of siding with the right wing in every dubious obsession, that your paper will print another such piece tomorrow or next week? One cannot hold a discussion with a group, such as the New York Times, that disregards the facts so consistently. Thoughtful requires honest first, and, Mr. Calame, your paper hasn't been honest with me about matters such as Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the economic effects of large revenue reductions on the American economy. These are large issues, and that your paper can't get the right says that before we can have a truly thoughtful discussion, people like Judith Miller need to be sent away - not defended in their right to obstruct justice to the last.
The reality of the economics of newspapers is that they are bending over backwards for the right because of the realities of polarization by geography. As the country's political conflict is more and more a conflict between metropolitan areas and exurban ones - as one can see by looking at the counties won by Bush and the congressional districts won by Republicans versus Kerry counties and Democratic districts - newspapers are freer and freer to take their liberal readers for granted. A New Yorker is going to have to read the New York Times if he is in attached to a certain socio-economic strata. These readers lean overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party, and are far to the left of the public. Economically, the marginal reader leans to the right of the country as a whole. Your job is to keep those marginal readers attached to the Times, and so are articles like Richard Posner's. In short, Posner's economics hasn't even caught up to the marginal revolution of the 1870's - where firms and individuals make decisions based on their marginal consequences. Since Posner's pseudo-classical production argument fails to identify the marginal reader, it is, ipso facto, junk economics.
It is the marginal reader, or marginal voter, that controls the focus of discussion. Not necessarily the substance, and certainly not the day to day reality. However, what you have to say to get the next person to subscribe to the Times is what is important. In CPG we call it "generating incremental sales". The point of any action is to get someone to buy who would not otherwise have bought, or to buy more.
The two groups of marginal readers then are those who do not buy the New York Times because of geography - that is, those that lean right and are in a market for confirmation of their world view - and those who are finally disgusted with the New York Times entirely. This second group flocks to low cost of start up media, but they are still attached to the New York Times, unless they can plug into an alternate newsgathering stream. The new news gathering organizations in the US over the last 30 years have all been right wing - CNN, Fox, The Washington Times are all slanted heavily to the right.
This fact is driving the increasingly bifurcated world of the media. The non-geoographic marginal reader reads headlines, the marginal reader follows sensational stories, the marginal reader wants to hear that America is right, America is winning and everything is fine. He wants confirmation that his marginally attached status to the information stream is correct. Since the marginal reader leans to the right of the country as a whole - he doesn't live in New York City, and therefore is not going to purchase the New York Times simply on the basis of its local coverage and New York view of world coverage, the New York Times will include Judith Miller stories without batting an eyelash, but will create a whole new job - the one you hold - over perceived political correctness producing inaccurate reporting. Posner isn't going to cause a flap, despite the numerous inaccuracies in his piece, and despite his misleading and biased viewpoint.
More over, when looked at from an economic point of view - this indicates that the break down of the monolithic media system is going to push outlets to pander more, not less, to micro-audiences that have choices. This is basic market economics - more competition means that firms must offer more or charge less. The New York Times is already charging nothing for much of its content to web readers who have choices. It still has a news gathering capability that leaves, for example, the Village Voice, in the dust, and thus does not have to move to the left on news coverage. But it does have to compete with news gathering organizations on the right. And the cost of a news gathering organization - as opposed to a news analyzing one - has not gone down. One must still move protons, lots of them, to put a reporter in Baghdad. While digitality reduces the cost of analysis and search - a fact that was brought home to me last night again by some material I dug up on a story of current interest - it does not reduce the costs of being there.
Thus, economically, the "cost of entry" to having a world class news organization, the real capital of a major daily such as the New York Times or a broadcast news organization, has dropped only slightly. While telecommunications is beginning to break this down, as "media collectives" rely on the ability to find people who are already on the ground in particular locations, there simply is no competition in the reliability of the stream of information and reports from trained reporters versus the digital stream of ordinary people. Since I often have to pick information out of the latter stream, it's problems - signal to noise ratio, inconsistency of observations, welter of different languages and so on - are solulable, but they are a long way from being solved. While a generation from now a news organization may well be able to replace many of its reporters with streams from media equipped audience members, and indeed this is happening as more and more amateur video is run on local news, it is not here and now.
This turns Posner's argument 180 degrees around. The low cost of entry pushes micro-media to the right, not the left, of all media - and the continued high cost of entry for newsgathering means that it is large, well financed, corporations - which, judging from OpenSecrets.org lean fairly far to the right in their donating habits - that can compete with existing outlets. Thus the marginal readers that the New York Times is battling for are to the right, not the left of its current readership. More over, hard pandering to the left is an economically losing strategy - they are attaching themselves to news streams that are not the New York Times, and the more the Times chases them, the more people in "the middle" that it alienates. Even if that is the right side of middle.
Let me underline again that Posner flunks basic economics and business here, which should have been a basic barrier to entry. But he wants to tell a propaganda story, and your paper desperately wants the marginal readers who want to hear about how the "mainstream media" is moving to the left. This is is, rhetorically, the story that many people now on the right tell themselves: they haven't changed since 1964, the liberals have gone too far. It's dressed up in Brooksian misuse of factoids, but it is the same story that Zell Miller and the neo-conservatives of the Project for a New American Century tell themselves.
It is, in its own way, true. Many Americans are still bigots, though they have been taught that, operationally, it is a bad idea to be anti-black bigots, they have found that homosexuals and muslims are acceptable targets. It is also true that majority of Americans don't want to believe in science if it conflicts with Sunday school, as a survey on belief in Natural Selection will show. It is true that most Americans didn't understand how the economy worked in 1964, and they don't today. Many Americans in 1964 didn't want to worry about the world beyond our borders, except in simple terms, and they don't today. However, the difference between 1964 and 2005 is that, economically, the United States is far less dominant economically, and far more dependent in resources than it was in 1964. In 1964 it would have been painful to slam the door shut, now it would be catastrophic. The unfortunate reality for the man of 1964 trapped in 2005, is that biology is knocking on the door of being commodity, and that his oil doesn't come from West Texas any more, but from Venezuela.
The ideological difference between 1964 and today, is that in 1964, as the Ranger mission story shows, people had faith in government programs and government projects to work and make life better. As the Space Shuttle article in today's New York Times shows, they don't today. It hasn't occurred to many of them that it has been Republicans running those programs for much of the last 35 years, because the idea itself is "liberal" in the publics mind. The other difference is that in 1964 Posner's article would have appeared in The National Review, because any reasonable editor would have quizzed him on the facts of his assertions about media, and would have found them wanting. In 1964, the entry to "thoughtful" discourse was, well, being thoughtful. But the marginal reader today isn't thoughtful. On the contrary, what defines him is that he is thoughtless and heedless of facts, and is not in the market for information, but the market for confirmation.
I've written a number of harsh things about the lack of integrity at the New York Times - all of them have been deserved. Your paper was a powerful enabler in deceiving the American public about the economic agenda of Candidate Bush, the political agenda of President Bush, and the foreign policy agenda of the Bush White House. Your paper printed straight out lies, unreconstructed and from those who reaped enormous financial gain from them, in order to take us to in Iraq. Your paper refused to debunk the economic numbers of Bush or his waves of revenue reductions, and still refuses to do so to day in unequivocal language. This is again the marginal reader. I'm well aware that buried in off pages and on off days the New York Times has done solid analysis of how badly the Bush economic program has worked out - and your paper rightly knows that a liberal such as myself will ferret it out. Your paper also knows that were you to run a weekly headline on how large the deficit is, and how the gap between labor slack and unemployment indicates that the Bush economy is beginning to come unravelled, you would be excoriated from pillar to post.
The reason "thoughtful" replies are going to be in short supply from the left, is that the very request is insulting. The right wing wasn't, and isn't, thoughtful about attacking the New York Times for being too liberal. And your paper's response is to run long, factually shoddy, articles saying that the New York Times is indeed too far to the left. What works for Posner is having a large crowd of vitriolic attackers which your paper comes to see as needing to be placated. Why should anyone else do anything else, when that tactic is what works?