Abstract
When in 2011 Paul Krugman attacked the press for bending over backwards to give equal billing to conservative experts on social security, even though the conservatives were plainly wrong, I celebrated. Social security isn’t the biggest part of the government’s budget, and calls to privatize it in order to save the country from bankruptcy were blatant fear mongering. Why should the press report those calls with a neutrality that could mislead readers into thinking the position reasonable?
Journalists’ ethic of balanced reporting looked, at the time, like gross negligence at best, and deceit at worst. But lost in the pathos of the moment was the rationale behind that ethic, which is not so much to ensure that the truth gets into print as to prevent the press from making policy. For if journalists do not practice balance, then they ultimately decide the angle to take.
And journalists, like the rest of us, will choose their own.
The dark underbelly of the engaged journalism unleashed by progressives like Krugman has nowhere been more starkly exposed than in the unfolding assault of journalists, operating as a special interest, on Google, Facebook, and Amazon, three companies that writers believe have decimated their earnings over the past decade.
In story after story, journalists have manufactured an antitrust movement aimed at breaking up these companies, even though virtually no expert in antitrust law or economics, on either the right or the left, can find an antitrust case against them, and virtually no expert would place any of these three companies at the top of the genuinely long list of monopolies in America that are due for an antitrust reckoning.
Document Type
Commentary
Publication Date
12-20-2019
7-20-2022
Repository Citation
Woodcock, Ramsi, "Big Ink v. Bigger Tech" (2019). Law Faculty Popular Media. 64.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/law_facpub_pop/64
Notes/Citation Information
Ramsi A. Woodcock, Big Ink v. Bigger Tech, Truth on the Market: Scholarly Commentary on Law, Economics, and More (Dec. 30, 2019), at https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/12/30/big-ink-vs-bigger-tech/.