Bryan Caplan on the media
Posted on | December 8, 2008 | Comments Off by Aschwin de Wolf
In his excellent book The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan writes “like politicians, the media show viewers what they want to see and tell them what they want to hear” and speculates about the possibility that voters’ beliefs about other topics than economics may not be any sounder.
When I find mistakes in newspaper articles on topics that I know a lot about, it often strikes me that errors in reporting can hardly be confined to those topics. If experts on all topics would collaborate and judge the quality of reporting in one single newspaper, would they all come to the same conclusion about their areas of expertise? On the other hand, it is hard to imagine that the quality of reporting is equally poor on all topics. This raises the question if there could be something like a general economic theory of the quality of news reporting.
For example, when a newspaper’s wine expert writes on wine it is reasonable to assume that the person generally knows what he is writing about (taste is another matter). But when a newspaper has to report on something for which few real experts exist (or have to guess what constitutes an expert in the area), such as cryonics, the quality of the reporting is often abysmal. When there is no expert or expert consensus, does this leave more room for popular bias?
What are the variables and incentives that shape the quality of news reporting?
Comments
Depressed Metabolism- Buddhism and the scientific worldview
- Ken Hayworth on straight freezing in cryonics
- The low-hanging fruit of technological progress
- Free will versus determinism as it relates to cryonics
- How many neurons need to survive for cryonics to work?
- Chemical preservation and cryonics research
- The presumption of death
- Cryonics and fear of the future
- Hard determinism and the problem of evil
- Ocean power: a new era in energy