The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications

"It’s a wonderful book, in part because it shows that the founding fathers also confronted this problem of rational ignorance. Back at the time of the founding, it was already the case that, at an individual level, it did not always pay for a person to be fully informed about politics. Paul Starr makes a huge contribution to history by showing that the founders tried to subsidize discussion about public affairs through postal subsidies. They made it relatively cheap to send newspapers through the mail. Actually it was free for editors to send copies of newspapers to other editors across the country. That dispersal of information made it a lot cheaper for newspapers to talk about politics. When de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America he commented on the proliferation of newspapers in the United States. “It is very hard to fully monetize the value you create through investigative reporting.” So the founders saw the need to subsidize political discourse. But if you fast-forward to the 1980s, during the deregulation of television, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said, “the public interest is defined by the public’s interest.” Today, there is a tension between people who believe that if the story is important it will get told and the people who believe, like I do, that there is a set of stories which don’t pass media market tests, that would pass a cost-benefit test from society’s perspective. I’ve shown in my book that if you spend the time to do an investigation and tell a story that changes laws, the benefits of that law spill over to many people who might never be your readers or viewers. It is very hard to fully monetize the value you create through investigative reporting. That means that the media underprovides coverage of public affairs. There are different ways that you can address that. The way the founders did it, Paul Starr shows, is through postal subsidies. I got into studying the media through the economic market for TV programming. I had been studying the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory , a yearly list of polluters and what is coming out of their smoke stacks. One day I saw a proposal being considered by Congress that would’ve shown who was advertising on violent television programs. Something in my mind clicked. I thought, you can view television violence like a pollution problem. People who provide violent entertainment programs are not trying to stimulate violence, they’re trying to attract an audience, primarily males 18 to 34, and sell them to advertisers. But, as they’re doing it, they’re exposing kids, aged 8 to 18, to violent programming. The research shows that some types of violence in some contexts will stimulate some kids to aggression. That negative impact on society is not something people think about when they’re producing violent programming. That negative spillover led me to write a book about the market for violent programming."

"This book looks at the historical precedents through a different angle, not through sensibility, what brains are doing, but through institutions. And its main point is that the state has been intimately involved in the evolution of the media from the beginning. It looks in particular at the very homely institution of the post office, which is provided for at the beginning of the American Republic. Media rely on public institutions like the post office. The post office was established precisely in order to expedite traffic in ideas and writing of all sorts. It’s a worthy reminder, and an incontrovertible reminder, that fantasies of free markets that operate on their own to produce media are just as foolish in reference to the ancestral past as they are with the respect to the presumed spontaneous combustion that produced the internet. Anybody who knows anything about the internet knows that policy, government policy specifically, was a necessary condition."