The Liberal-Authoritarian Urge

Writing in City Journal, Adam D. Thierer has some cogent thoughts on the current Golden Age of Media in the Information Age. You really should read the whole thing.

The Media Cornucopia

This media cornucopia is a wonderful development for a free society—or so you’d think. But today’s media universe has fierce detractors, and nowhere more vehemently than on the left. Their criticisms seem contradictory. Some, such as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, contend that real media choices, information sources included, remain scarce, hindering citizens from fully participating in a deliberative democracy. Others argue that we have too many media choices, making it hard to share common thoughts or feelings; democracy, community itself, again loses out. Both liberal views get the story disastrously wrong. If either prevails, what’s shaping up to be America’s Golden Age of media could be over soon.

I've touched on this subject many times previously, in terms of describing how the "impartial media" was a chimera in the first place, a two-generation illusion resulting from the rise of radio and television and the associated costs resulting in a tight media oligopoly. With the radical reduction in the "publishing cost" of electronic media, the oligopoly was broken and the market fragmented. Instead of a monolithic groupthink media establishment, we now have an ever-increasing number of media outlets seeking niche markets. Where the niche media markets of old were based on geography, now they're based on personal preference and worldview.

Thierer's polemical thesis is that liberals want to re-impose the media monolith, on the grounds that we now have too many choices and are too dumb to choose wisely. Democrats in Congress agree.

Read On!

What information consumes is rather obvious,” Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Herbert Simon remarked in 1971: “the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” Thirty-six years later, confronting a “wealth of information” that Simon could never have imagined, a growing group of left-wing critics warns about its destructive consequences. The titles of recent books by Todd Gitlin and Barry Schwartz—Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives and The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, respectively—capture the anxiety felt by these opponents of media multiplicity. It’s just too much.

The real problem for the left is that they're losing the market-share battle of the media. Given a free market and a cornucopia of choices, consumers are increasingly opting for the media outlets that best fit their own worldviews, and the market share for leftist views and interpretations is proving small.

What unifies the two schools of leftist media criticism, beneath their apparent opposition, is pure elitism. Media abundance (which the scarcity critics must implausibly wave away as a mirage) has meant more room for right-of-center viewpoints that, while popular with many Americans, the critics find completely unacceptable. The fact that Bill O’Reilly gets better ratings than Bill Moyers perturbs them to no end. It’s just not fair!...

...When Rush Limbaugh has more listeners than NPR, or Tom Clancy sells more books than Noam Chomsky, or Motor Trend gets more subscribers than Mother Jones, liberals want to convince us (or themselves, perhaps) that it’s all because of some catastrophic market failure or a grand corporate conspiracy to dumb down the masses. In reality, it’s just the result of consumer choice. All the opinions that the Left’s media critics favor are now readily available to us via multiple platforms. But that’s not good enough, it seems: they won’t rest until all of us are watching, reading, and listening to the content that they prefer.

Not surprisingly, the left's preferred solution is to demand "equal time" in all niche market outlets, in part by restoring the misnamed Fairness Doctrine.

...liberal groups would love to put their thumbs on the scale and tilt the media in their preferred direction. Scarcity-obsessed Dennis Kucinich has recently introduced plans in Congress to revive the Fairness Doctrine, which once let government regulators police the airwaves to ensure a balancing of viewpoints, however that’s defined. A new Fairness Doctrine would affect most directly opinion-based talk radio, a medium that just happens to be dominated by conservatives. If a station wanted to run William Bennett’s show under such a regime, they might now have to broadcast a left-wing alternative, too, even if it had poor ratings, which generally has been the case with liberal talk. Sunstein also proposes a kind of speech redistributionism. For the Internet, he suggests that regulators could impose “electronic sidewalks” on partisan websites (the National Rifle Association’s, say), forcing them to link to opposing views. The practical problems of implementing this program would be forbidding, even if it somehow proved constitutional. How many links to opposing views would secure the government’s approval? The FCC would need an army of media regulators (much as China has today) to monitor the millions of webpages, blogs, and social-networking sites and keep them in line.

That's correct. We're not able to think for ourselves, and allowing us free choice in determining our information feeds will inevitably skew our thinking away from "fairness," so "fairness" in the form of a false egalitarianism must be imposed on us by mandate.

At base the argument is an old one, a classic manifestation of American left "liberalism" and the nanny-state authoritarian impulse. We're not capable of making our own choices wisely, so those choices must be imposed upon us by those who Know Better. It's For Our Own Good, after all. We must get our prescribed amount of "balance."

Yeah. Where have we heard THAT before?

[Cross-posted to Baldilocks.]