Should be press liable or not — страница 3

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place at the wrong time when a product malfunctions. Even when these kinds of failures occur, legal accountability is problematic if it in turn entails inevitable error in application or requires the taking of such costly precautions that they cover up all benefits. Conceiving of quality as a function of accuracy, relevance and comple- teness, consumers of political information are not in a strong position when it comes to detecting quality defects in the political information they receive. Revelance may well be within their ken, but since they are quite unable to verify for themselves either the accuracy or the completeness of any particular account of political events. In addition, since political information usually comes bundled with other entertainment and news features that

sustain their loyality to particular suppliers, consumers are not inclined to punish information producers by avoiding future patronage even when they commit an occasional gross error. Nevertheless, competition among journalists and publishers of political information tends to create an environment that is in general more conductive to accuracy than to lies or half-truths. Journalistic careers can be made by exposing others' errors, and they can be ruined when a journalist is revealed to be careless - 6 - about truth. These realities create incentives for journalists not to make mistakes. Moreover, the investment that mainstream publishers and broadcas- ters make in their reputations for thoroughness and accuracy attests to the market's perceived ability to detect and reward

suppliers of consistently high- quality information. Information suppliers that cater to more specialized tastes play a significant role. These alternative ways of getting info are often probe apparent realities more deeply, interprete events with greater sophistication and analyse data more thoroughly than the mainstream media are inclined to do. In doing so, of course, their principal motivation is to satisfy their own customers. But while pursuing this goal, they constrain (even if they do not completely eliminate) the mainstream media's ability to portray falsehood as truth or to OMIT key facts from otherwise apparently compelete pictures. The array of incentives with respect to at least the general quality of political information, with which the market confronts information

providers creates systematic tendencies for them to provide political info that is accurate and complete. Or perhaps it would be slightly more precise to say that the market unfortunately does not appear systematically to reward producers of falsehood or half-truth information yet, according to their activities. So that consumers of political information don't need the club of legal liability to force information providers to provide them with quality information. The analysts ought not to be read as an asserting that the reason the market for political information works well is that it provides just the right kind and quality of information to each individual citizen and that each individual citizen has identical preferences for info about government. Indeed, the premise of this

argument is that the market works because citizens (or customers) do not have identical preferences and producers exploit that fact by finding - 7 - ways to cater to and profit from the varying demands of a diverse citizenry. An implicit assumption provides the normative underpinnings for the analysis. Obviously, the full implications of this assumption cannot be worked out here. The claim that the market in general "works" shouldn't be understood as a claim that the information it generates is uniformly edifying and never distorted. As you know many information producers pander to the public's appetite for scandal and still others see to it. These facts do not warrant the conclusion that the market doesn't work. More significantly, it seems inconceivable that any

system of government regulation - including a system in which information producers are liable for "defective" information - could in fact systematically generate a flow of political information that consistently provided more citizens with the quality and quantity that met their own needs as they themselves defined than does the competition in the marketplace of ideas that we presently enjoy. This analysis suggests that the workings of the market create situation in which consumers of political information do not need the threat of producer liability to guarantee that they are systematically getting a TRUSTWORTHY product. But consumers are not the only potential victims of defective information and market incentives are not always adequate to protect NONCONSUMER