Everyone who cares about the media should read Jay Hamilton's All the News That's Fit to Sell, which shows that many of the cultural/political explanations of press behavior that we toss around turn out to have deeper economic foundations. (Bonus: He's a really nice guy.)
Here Brad DeLong paraphrases a profound but depressing comment that Hamilton made at a recent conference:
Jay has depressed me about the prospects for organizations like the [Washington] Post. One of his main points is that organizations like the Post are by-and-large not in the information-for-citizenship business but in the entertainment business: the important thing for the Post's editors is that they print lively political-entertainment cage matches. It's only those organizations that are in the business of selling producer information to those who will then use that information and need it to be accurate--the Financial Times, the news pages of the Wall Street Journal, the National Journal (for political and lobbying news: not economics, finance, or business coverage)--that can sustain a culture in which getting the story right before the jump is an important institutional value.
And even though the Post could be better, the fact that it's so much more aggressive at fact-checking than the New York Times seems attributable to the same phenomenon -- political professionals in DC remain part of the Post's core audience, whereas the Times serves a diffuse group of national consumers. What this means is that the prospects for aggressive fact-checking by most media outlets are dim unless the economic incentives change (maybe as a result of the increasing commodification of "he said"/"she said" news?).
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