Media

What's the state of the union? George W. Bush will give us his answer next week, and the Democrats theirs.

But my answer is different from that of the Republicans or the Democrats. I keep a folder, which I call "Page 34" news. That is, stuff that really should be on the front page--but gets drowned out by the urgent but at the same time strangely familiar news from the Middle East, from Capitol Hill or from a Hollywood… more

"Link found between hatred and killing" is not a headline that would sell many newspapers. But you might turn a few heads with "Link between hatred and killing changes in ominous way." Or--to put a finer point on it--"Ratio of killing to hatred slated to rise." This is one of the biggest stories of the last 30 years and, probably, the next 30 years: the growing lethality of hatred.

Why has terrorism become public enemy number one? The… more

We are posting J.H. Snider and Benjamin I. Page's 1997 study on the media ownership debate because it has become relevant. At a hearing on media ownership on May 13, 2003, Senate Commerce Committee Chair John McCain waved the study at a media mogul on the panel and said: "Do you think this is an anomaly?" McCain's comment and the study to which it referred were subsequently featured on the front page of the business section in The Washington Post… more

Pick up The Wall Street Journal today, and the business pages are full of stories about the men and women who built the stock market bubble. Months into the current downturn, the saga of Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, and other 1990s cheats has become the biggest running business story in decades -- and business journalists are hot on the trail. Should we blame sticky-fingered CEOs? Self-dealing analysts and accountants? Board members asleep at the switch? Absolutely. But there's another sector… more

It is well established that political information shares the characteristics of a public good (Downs 1957; Popkin 1991). People won’t acquire the socially optimal amount of political information because they can’t reap the full benefit of their investment. Recognizing that a well-informed populace is essential to a healthy democracy, the government grants major media substantial public subsidies and special legal protections (Cook 1998). In return, the media take on the costs of monitoring the government that individual members of the… more

The obsession of the news media with the Monica Lewinsky affair, in addition to other recent scandals -- the forgeries by Stephen Glass of The New Republic , the CNN nerve gas hoax -- have focused attention on the shortcomings of the mass media. While criticism is in order, it should be remembered that there are domains of public discourse other than journalism that also suffer from chronic institutional pathologies. American intellectual life at the end of the twentieth century… more