^Perhaps an alternative solution to external fact-checking organizations would be to simply let the market weed out the bad actors.
^People think that what markets do is achieve the best-possible result at the best-possible price, but that is not exactly true. Even when they work well, markets achieve an optimal balance of the quality of the result and the cost of achieving that result.
But even that isn’t exactly right, because it doesn’t tell us what aspects of a result count toward its quality.
^A car, for example, has different measures of quality, including its fuel efficiency, its maximal speed, its peak acceleration, and the attractiveness of its exterior and interior design.
How do we determine which of those features is going to count toward its quality?
^The short answer is that we can’t.
But one of the advantages of market thinking is that we don’t have to. In
some sense, the market will do that for us: Whichever car sells best is the one that had the best combination of price and features.
^But when we say “best,” all that means is popular with the consumers in that car-buying market. And here’s what that means: When you see what features the market rewards, you learn something about what sorts of features car buyers wanted, rather than gaining information about some sort of objective standard for assessing which car is best, all things considered.
^And actually, as the case of the car indicates, there won’t be one combination of qualities and price that will uniquely appeal to consumers. Instead, there will be a range of different combinations of qualities and price to attract different subsets of the car market. So, the car market is segmented into different categories that appeal to those different types of consumers.
S ome of the publications that adhere to norms of rigorous fact-checking include The New Yorker , Vanity Fair , Esquire, Wired, and Popular Mechanics.
Theories of Knowledge LECTURE 21 Testimony in the Media
^We can compare a market for ideas to the market for cars, and what we see is that—in the case of science, at least—we don’t have the confusing range of qualities against which to measure the worth of an idea. So, unlike with cars, we don’t have the potential sources of quality that we have to weigh against each other.
^In the case of science, the measure of the quality of an idea is whether it’s true or likely to be true. That is the one measure of quality against which we have to weigh the worth of an idea. That does seem like an advantage for science and one reason why we could say that in science the market is selecting for the truth of the ideas under consideration.
^A complicating factor is that scientists and other researchers—including researchers in the humanities and social sciences—are actually participating in multiple markets at the same time. One sort of market is monetary, in which a researcher might be able to monetize his or her ideas and measure his or her success by the amount of money someone is willing to pay for him or her to pursue those ideas.
^At the same time, researchers also participate in what economists call reputation markets, in which the measure of the success of an idea isn’t financial but reputational. It’s the quality of the reputation that the idea
and the originator of that idea have among other practitioners in the field.
^Furthermore, there can be other reputation markets in addition to the ones limited to individual academic fields. For example, certain high- profile researchers can enjoy a reputation in society more generally.
^The complication introduced by the fact that there are multiple markets is that there isn’t a strong connection between the monetary and reputational markets. It is often the case that someone’s ideas can be quite successful in reputation markets within his or her field without those ideas leading to corresponding financial success. And academic specialists will point out cases of their colleagues who have achieved financial success for their ideas without being able to achieve reputational success within their own field for those same ideas.
^Unfortunately, once you consider what the market is aimed at maximizing, it does not seem that a focus on the media marketplace would give us any reason to be optimistic that market mechanisms will make media organizations better sources of reliably accurate information.
^The reason for this is that what the media market is aimed at optimizing isn’t reliably accurate information. It
Theories of Knowledge LECTURE 21 Testimony in the Media
aims at optimizing what it rewards—
either with money or reputation.
And it’s geared toward rewarding whatever content can capture the attention of the greatest number of consumers.
^What this means for the news media is that their goal is to maximize attention—because by maximizing attention, they can deliver consumers
and data about those consumers to advertisers and other corporate customers.
^This would not pose a problem if the way to maximize the attention of consumers was to provide them with a wealth of reliably accurate information. But that’s not necessarily what consumers want.
I n his 2016 book review “They’ve Got You, Wherever You Are,” published in The New York Review of Books, Jacob Weisberg describes
the problems created by the current media market using the example of Facebook.
His point is that making the media landscape more impoverished when it comes to sources of high-quality, reliable news may not be the intention of Facebook or any of the other big players in media markets. However, it is likely to be an unintended
consequence, given that the market doesn’t seem to be geared toward rewarding that sort of high-quality, reliable news.
Theories of Knowledge LECTURE 21 Testimony in the Media