posner on the media

So Judge Richard Posner had a long, comprehensive look at the media in the NYT book review section on Sunday. I’m just reading it now.

He’s obviously a very smart guy, and knows how to make an argument … but I certainly disagree with him on a lot of points.

1. The news media have also become more sensational, more prone to scandal and possibly less accurate. Is this really true? Media sensationalism isn’t a new thing; every day I walk past a picture of our great 1928 front page featuring murderer Ruth Snyder strapped to the electric chair. Before Michael Jackson there was O.J., before that Charles Manson, Bruno Hauptmann and the Scottsboro Boys. It’s a little silly to generalize about “the news media” as if we were some big monolith — there was virtually no coverage of Scott Peterson on ABC’s World News Tonight, for example, and we won’t even talk about Newshour with Jim Lehrer…
2. The mainstream media are predominantly liberal – in fact, more liberal than they used to be. I’m very doubtful of the second claim here, and Posner offers no evidence to back up this allegation. My sense is just the opposite, in fact.
3. The rise of the conservative Fox News Channel caused CNN to shift to the left. CNN was going to lose many of its conservative viewers to Fox anyway, so it made sense to increase its appeal to its remaining viewers by catering more assiduously to their political preferences. Whaa? I watch CNN every day; I hardly think it’s “shifted to the left.” Actually, I think it’s very fair, except for Lou Dobbs. And it’s hard to categorize his anti-immigration/anti-globalization arguments as liberal or conservative.
4. Having no staff, the blogger is not expected to be accurate. Hmm. I don’t expect the same standards of accuracy in gossipy blogs like Drudge or Gawker that I would of the NYT. But for blogs that are full of specialized knowledge, like law “blawgs” — what’s the point of reading them if you can’t trust what they say?
5. What really sticks in the craw of conventional journalists is that although individual blogs have no warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. … [C]orrections in blogs are also disseminated virtually instantaneously, whereas when a member of the mainstream media catches a mistake, it may take weeks to communicate a retraction to the public. This is true not only of newspaper retractions – usually printed inconspicuously and in any event rarely read,

   Um… let’s see here. I do agree newspapers should take a page from the 24-hour news cycle and instantly post corrections on our websites, instead of waiting until the next morning. But most newspapers print corrections on page A2, which isn’t really inconspicuous. But the whole vaunted “error-correcting blogosphere” mechanism is overrated, IMHO. Sure, if I get a fairly well-known fact wrong like the capital of Botswana, someone might correct me. But other errors — like Powerline’s allegations about the Schiavo memo — aren’t so easy for readers to correct.

Lastly, all of what Posner says about these “proud professionals” who think their craft is “unsullied by commerce” … well, I’m sure there are some of these media snobs out there. But I think most of us realize that news is a business … and I’m not sure we take ourselves quite as seriously as he implies.