(2009-03-19) Journalistic Capture

The Regulatory Cathedral and the Bazaar. Yochai Benkler ponders the death of the newspaper: Critics of online media raise concerns about the ease with which gossip and unsubstantiated claims can be propagated on the Net.... It was precisely this respect and authority that made The New York Times’ reporting on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so instrumental in legitimating the lies that the Bush administration used to lead this country to war.

This is a fantastic insight, and indeed, it’s precisely the insight that we libertarians apply to the regulatory state.

That is, just as a decentralized media and a skeptical public is better than the cathedral style of news gathering, so too are decentralized certification schemes and a skeptical public better than a single, cathedral-style regulatory agency “guaranteeing” that businesses are serving consumers well.

Will Wilkinson on Journalistic Capture. Glenn Greenwald makes the main point I wanted to make about the last episode of Stewart v. Cramer... Cramer, like thousands of others, gives investment advice, and like thousands of others failed to call the collapse and therefore gave a ton of terrible advice.

Greenwald’s point is that CNBC, like basically every other news outlet, has been captured to some extent or other by the high-placed sources that it has so fastidiously cultivated.

Greenwald rightly points out that this is exactly how the New York Times and other elite media outlets talked the country into the war on Iraq.

The most they’ll acknowledge is that it was confined to a couple of bad apples — The Judith Miller Defense. But the Cramer-like journalistic behavior during that period that was so widespread and did so much damage is behavior that our press corps, to this day, believes is proper and justified.

And here’s something I’d like Jon Stewart to grasp. In some important sense, Tim Geithner faces the same assymetrical information quandry Cramer did. The government is so incredibly dependent on Wall Street for much of the information it needs that it is almost inconceivable that the government (and thus the taxpayer) is not being gamed.

Somehow I’d never thought much before about the similarity between regulatory capture and a journalist’s becoming a tool of her sources, but it’s a pretty striking similarity.

Mike Masnick: Journalistic Regulatory Capture. Tim Lee recently highlighted an interesting, but worth exploring, aside made by Will Wilkinson, talking about the concept of “journalistic capture.”

regulatory capture... There are a variety of reasons behind this, in part due to the fact that industries will always have more advanced lobbying activities rather than consumers or other parties, but also due to the fact that there’s often a revolving door between regulators and the industries they regulate

Regulators are all too happy to allow this to happen — as their main source of information about those industries comes straight from the industry reps themselves. Thus, the “need” for any particular piece of legislation is quite often presented from the industry’s viewpoint directly

Wilkinson’s point is that something quite similar often happens with journalists and the industries or individuals they cover. Basically, the journalists are almost entirely reliant on their sources within the industry to provide the information necessary for reporting on that industry.