I am motivated to ask this question after watching the Adam Kokesh / Jason Burmas interview, which mimics pretty closely conversations I have with people. The exact same bad statist arguments, the same progression to the conversation, ending with essentially “I am not saying you’re wrong, but lets just agree to disagree”.
One thing I wanted to ask people here about is how to better answer questions about the media. Everyone pretty much agrees that the mainstream media is trash, and I’d like to be able to point to specific government interventions that might be a cause of this.
Adam says (see 20:20) that Big Media gets its powers from government, but (due to the fast-paced conversation) only provides one (fairly weak) piece of evidence for this… “They get to interview the President.”
In what more substantive ways does government intervene in the media, which make the current Big Media a bad model for what a free market media could be? How does the government (or how did the government before the internet) maintain the media cartel?
Finally, isn’t there a decent argument to be made that Big Media is actually very efficiently satisying consumer demand right now… aren’t the masses getting exactly what they want from their TV’s and newspapers?
They are satisfying consumer demand for entertainment, however they are marketing their goods as ‘objective, accurate reporting of facts and events’.
Technically a case of fraud.
The main problem I see is that rarely does mainstream media cover anything of substance. Personally, I don’t care what Congressman X tweeted about Obama, or the godawful “political analysis” done by airheaded “political commentators.” But the point of mass media is to divert the public’s attention away from issues that matter, so maybe they’re doing their job.
Good thing we have Fox News to stick it to all those liberal bastards.
What’s wrong with the mainstream media? They seek to entertain and spread the opinion of the people who own them. Which generally involves no offending the wealthy, not covering free trade treaties or painting OWS as silly teenagers.
The “point” of any firm is to maximise profits. Are you saying that there is collusion going on and actually the media organizations have some goal other than maximising their profits? I think the fact that they all get together at places like Bilderberg shows this is true.
But free market theory tells us that collusion is not sufficient for a long-lasting cartel; you can only maintain a cartel with some form of government intervention. Without government intervention, the cartel will collapse, either through one of the colluders breaking the agreement (i.e. trying to maximise profits, rather than sticking to the agreement to “divert the public’s attention away from issues that matter”), or through new entrants to the market out-competing the cartel, or both. Why haven’t any of these things happened to collapse the cartel?
The relationship between the state and the media in the USA is different to that in other countries that have a tv license and a state media dominated market. Although they do share some similar characteristics. The mainstream media generally get their news from the news wires (AP, reuters), official bodies and associations, the government in the form of press releases and other independent sources. In countries with a TV license like the UK the state media requires a tax for watching television to fund its own media empire. They have strict regulations on content if you are able to launch a tv channel or radio station.
The government creates barriers to entry in the media industry through licensing requirements and regulations that can increase the cost. I am not sure what the media gets out of a relationship with the government in the usa. I think it is more that people that work for the media organizations are employed because they have a specific ideology and that includes the state. So they are in favor of the state and they work together to further their shared interest.
It is a lot more subtle than people might think. All you realy need is the chief editors of a few main newspapers and the chiefs of a few major media organizations to create a public consensus or to assist in furthering an agenda. What they get out of it, we can only imagine.
The FCC licenses the use of airwaves and many FCC regulations apply to cable and other non-broadcast media despite the fact that they are not broadcasting! Being a government agency, praxeological law dictates that it will allocate airwaves according to the interests of the government, not the interests of the tooth fairy or the interests of “Society”, whatever that is.
Copyright/IP law have a cartelizing effect on all forms of media. This is very visible in the record industry where wannabe-superstars travel to Hollywood or Nashville and throw themselves at the record label executives in the hopes of capturing a tiny sliver of the multi-billion dollar money fountain. If they please the right people in the right way, they might even make a name for themselves. Needless to say, in this environment, bands write music to please the record label executives, not the crowds. It’s up to the record label executives - not the crowds - whether crowd-pleasing music is being served or not.
The same dynamic is in operation in the news media but with the added twist that the single largest headline generator is the government itself. Careers are made and lost on access to prominent government figures, so being in good standing with prominent government figures is a prerequisite to the highest echelons of success. Needless to say, anarchism is not a popular political philosophy among prominent government figures.
And when talking of monopoly here, Friedman states that in the US, the strongest and most important monopolies are those that derive from governmental privilige…and lists the monopoly of a TV license first.
I didn’t want to mention the BBC because it’s pretty obvious how the state controls the message that organisation is putting out. But the thing is, I don’t perceive the BBC as being any more pro-State than ITV, Sky or any of the American channels. Governments clearly don’t need a state run media in order to control the message that is being put out.
How do news wires operate?
What are the licensing requirements and regulations on, say, a newspaper? “Thou shalt support the State”?
OK, what about newspapers? Does the FCC regulate them too?
I can’t quite see how the same dynamic is in play. Do the record label executives really choose whether crowd-pleasing music is to be served? Don’t they still seek profits, except that IP allows them to make much larger profits than they would otherwise?
I suppose this is a big factor, but it doesn’t seem satisfactory because it is still saying that collusion (not actual government intervention into the industry) is the root cause. It’s conceivable that one organisation in a free market could be a “headline generator” on the same level that government is now, and then that organisation would have equivalent influence in the media to government now, if this explanation is all there is to it.
Another example. I just watched a documentary that mentioned the Trans-Texas Corridor and it said that the company hoping to build the road bought up dozens of newspapers along the route, in order to change public opinion in favor of the project. My first thought was why didn’t the sellers of the original newspapers just start new competing newspapers which were anti-TTC, then presumably they could have out-competed the “sold out” rags. I don’t see what government intervention could have stopped this happening. Maybe they did, but they weren’t able to out-compete the original papers, because they could not get enough readers to switch.
They basically create content and put it out there, and all the news organizations basically sit at the spigot, basically watching the wires like hungry pigs waiting for the next feed. That’s basically the majority of what they do. They literally watch the wires 24 hours a day, and then report what information they’re given. Depending on the organization they decide what to report and when, and how much time to dedicate to it, but a large portion of the mainstream media is slave to only a few main sources of information.
And of course, as you might guess, the government is one of those major sources.
From everything to national and international news to local happenings — as discussed in War Made Easy (an incredibly well done film..I mean like, you need to watch it and send it to everyone you know)…they make the case quite clear that news organizations are quite beholden to government agencies, as if they report anything that is too unacceptable or out of line, they may not get the interview with the top General, or the CIA director, or the official for whatever agency has the most information on the topic at hand next time.
The case of Kelly Thomas is a great example on the local level. A local blog ended up basically breaking that story and bringing it to national and even international attention while the local media took no interest initially. And in that segment you hear the same thing…how reporters will even tell you straight up, they need to maintain at least a working relationship with the police, because if they print something that doesn’t shine well on the department, they’re not very likely to much information in the future. And of course they rely on the department for a lot of relevant info on crime and cases. So essentially, you have to play ball if you want to keep your own job.
It’s not that straightforward, but think about it…you need state approval before you can start your business, and virtually everything you do is under that government grant…which can be revoked at any time. You’re not going to get a governmental privilege without being at least “friendly” with the State (i.e. players within power positions). And you’re certainly not going to keep that privilege if you ever cross the line too far.
