And tiny penalties for bad pundits.
‘There must be reputation effects that matter to the firm, some way of making media firms pay a cost for bad pundit behavior.”
Mark Thoma:
So I don’t know what the answer is.
It drives me crazy that, for example, people invited to appear on CNN will say something that is an outright lie, and the person saying it clearly knows it is a lie or misrepresentation, but yet they get invited back anyway due to their entertainment value.
Why isn’t the rule that if you lie once on the air, you can never come back again?
No matter what they say or how accurate they are, the line-up on the news, op-ed pages, etc., etc., is pretty much the same tired old group of people who have proven they will say controversial things that draw ratings. And that is what matters, never mind the accuracy.
Mark Liberman:
Pundit’s Dilemma — a game, like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which the player’s best move always seems to be to take the low road, and in which the aggregate welfare of the community always seems fated to fall.
The Yes Men:
For all of us, what we try to do is just remember what the difference between right and wrong really is, and hold corporations accountable to that.
We happen to have a very, very great degree of freedom for corporations which erodes everyone else’s freedom.