I'm going to disagree with a few points here.As to point 2. To get the effects you note, people must have a tv. You can have as many transmissions as you like but they will have no effect, good or bad, if on one can view them. So the bundling of transmissions with a tv is important.
First off, the way of making tv excludable is by using scrambled signals, like Sky does, not by bundling it with the physical TV. Bundling it with the TV is what yields things like the BBC TV tax.
Second, and again, the public good that's being debated is the improvements in policy you get with a more informed polity and the improvements in governance you get with more vigilance. Those effects are nonrivalrous and non-excludable.
How do you distinguish neighbourhood effects from public goods? I'd think of neighbourhood effects as being nonrivalrous and nonexcludable within a small area. The public good here in question apparently applies to the whole polity.
The better critique, I think, is that it's ambiguous whether some of this is public good or public bad - Campbell Live is responsible, in part, for wrecking the legal highs framework through populist drumbeating, for example.
As to point 3, I'm thinking more along the lines of an externality. As Milton Friedman put in "Capitalism and Freedom":
[...] and from "neighorhood effects" - effects on third parties for which it is not feasible to charge or recompense them (p.14).
"Second, and again, the public good that's being debated is the improvements in policy you get with a more informed polity and the improvements in governance you get with more vigilance. Those effects are nonrivalrous and non-excludable. "
ReplyDeleteWell, yeees. But first you've got to show that journalism, most especially TV journalism, does lead to a more informed polity rather than a more badly informed one.
It is, for example, difficult to see that Fox and Jon Stewart shouting at each other actually informs anyone rather than panders to the extant beliefs of their respective audiences.
And we know very well from the newspaper world that that type of journalism does not even attempt to inform readers, it chases their extant beliefs.
It's possible that in some theoretical world there's those public benefits to impartial journalism. But it's not entirely obvious that that theoretical world is the one we inhabit.