This blog is itself much more worthwhile reading than any newspaper column.

If it were true that a large audience meant lots of fact-checking, Rush Limbaugh would be far more accurate than any newspaper, having (I have not fact-checked this) more listeners than any paper has readers. A media rises to the level of its audience. The internet has a smarter audience and hence produces better journalism.

What intrigues me most about this is the lack of correlation between being a payed, trained, professional journalist, and writing good and accurate articles.

“One of the things that I know the blogs are best at is debunking myths that can slip through a lot of the traditional media outlets and a lot of the conventional wisdom,” he said, according to audio of the call posted on Web sites.”

President Obama

And I second Jonathan’s view.

It’s seems more reasonable to claim that what we are seeing are the effects of suddenly taking hundreds of local monopolies and forcing them to compete with each other in the national market. Since we have an over-abundance of journalism suppliers, they are driving the prices down to unsustainable levels. Once the less efficient and lower quality news outlets go bankrupt, shouldn’t we expect the market to obtain a standard competitive equilibrium based on supply and demand?

Please let me know if I have made any incorrect assumptions here.

If you’re not already familiar with it, Mike Masnick has some pretty incisive commentary on the new economics of journalism and what the big media companies are doing wrong:

Tehran Bureau Shows That If There’s A Need, Reporting Will Get Done
But Who Will Cover City Council Meetings?
Wait, Wasn’t The Internet Killing Journalism?
The gap between the current news business’s conception of the economics of the news and the modern economics of the news.

IOW, the consequences for mistakes and lies should be greater, but that doesn’t mean they are currently trivial.

Tell me how this gets implemented in the real world. Who gives out the subsidies? Who decides who is qualified to receive a subsidy? Does anyone evaluate the results?

A subsidy to one producer artificially lowers his costs, creating a barrier to entry, giving him monopoly power. A monopolist’s product has lower quality than a competitive producer’s product.

Also, a subsidy reduces a producer’s reliance on his customers and therefore reduces a producer’s reliance on public relations – specifically, on his own reputation. Reputation is what keeps a reporter from saying things that don’t check out. In essence, a subsidy can encourage incompetence. Furthermore, the more the producer needs the subsidy, the more perverse the effect of the subsidy will be on him because the greater the degree to which he will be freed from reliance on his customers. So we have a situation where, if the big media actually need the subsidy, then precisely because they need it, we should not give it to them.

Also you don’t seem to have addressed the point, raised elsewhere, that any money the government doles out is likely to come with increasing strings attached which are likely to be captured by interests – for example, the dominant party can direct newspapers to investigate the opposition to death.

Your analysis of the blogosphere is incomplete. While individual bloggers may be error-prone because of weak incentives, the blogosphere seems to police error – and it does this not only for itself but also for the big media, giving rise to a few famous scandals which left the big media red-faced. You seem to think the blogosphere produces a cacophony which never effectively arrives at a conclusion and which is therefore tuned out at a whole, but that is not my perception of it. I’m sure Dan Rather wishes that the blogs which supported him were able to indefinitely postpone his embarrassment, but that’s not so.

I think there are some problems with concentrated media. From what I’ve heard, the media sat on information about the ailments of FDR and JFK. Mickey Kaus kept banging the drum on bhtv about John Edwards, and it turned out he was right that the Times sat on the story until the Enquirer revealed it. One might argue that those stories weren’t important (or perhaps even harmful) for the public to hear, but that seems very subjective. It’s much harder to keep a lid on things if there are a proliferation of small media outlets.

This issue was a particular obsession of Mencius Moldbug, who presented his Revipedia and Resartus ideas as destroyers of our small-c constitution. I thought the ideas were dumb, and anything that starts out with his motivation of countering Dem Ebil Media Libruls (apparently including Wikipedia) was doomed to a fate like Conservapedia. I’m a more indifferent laissez-faire sort. Perhaps the public doesn’t place a high value on being politically informed, as opposed to entertained, so how big a loss would it be if they just consumed unverified gossip and rumors? From what I’ve heard, publicizing “pork” just makes the congresscritters who dole it out more popular. Maybe if the public was more distracted unilateral free-trade and geo-engineering might be crammed through?

On a somewhat related note, I recently preserved an old Radar article on how the media rewarded and punished pundits with different records on Iraq. It makes me more doubtful of the incentives regarding reputation in our media. Dan Froomkin’s recent firing is another data-point.