I'm finding the meta-analysis of media failures in the netroots to be lacking in something. We do an excellent job of focusing on the particularly delinquent and malfeasant prominent media repeat offenders like Broder, Brooks, Dowd or Fox News. We have excellent media critics like Digby, Glenn Greenwald and of course Media Matters who are able to incisively tear apart flawed journalism and note the broader storylines the media are adhering to without evidence. But we're not thinking enough at the systemic level of how the media is organized, and how that system itself is contributing to the negative results we see. After all, if we replace the current occupants of Versailles on the Potomac, how will we prevent their replacements from being just as bad eventually? Joe Klein must have been a sincere and well meaning liberal at some point.
Here I will attempt to apply game theory to the media, in hopes of finding a better understanding for how it all went so wrong, and continues to do so.
First, let's refresh on game theory a tad for anyone unfamiliar. Game theory attempts to model decisions made by independent actors which have consequences for all parties, and where choosing to cooperate or not will affect the results. It is frequently used to explain economic phenomena. The most famous one is called the Prisoner's Dilemma.
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The Prisoner's Dilemma (PD)
Feel free to skip this section if you know the PD and Game theory reasonably well
Picture two burglars, who have robbed a house together and have now been caught by the police. On them at the time of arrest, each had tools for picking locks. The penalty for conviction of carrying lock-picking tools 1 year in prison. The police know the two robbed the house, but cannot prove it. The penalty for robbing the house is 5 years in jail.
The police interrogate the two seperately, and each is told: "We have you on lock-picking, but if you confess to the robbery and will testify against your partner in court, we will drop the lock-pick charge"
Here is the dilemma: The two have no way to communicate. Each one can get away free if he betrays the other, but only if the other does not confess. If both men confess, then the police will get them both on robbery, and each will get 5 years in jail. If neither confesses, both men will get 1 year for the lock pick charge. If one confesses and the other does not, the one who does not confess will get nailed for both robbery and lock-pick tools and will get 6 years. So the essential problem is one of trust. The most desirable result for each individual is to go free by confessing and having his partner not confess. After that, it would be better if neither confessed since both will only get 1 year. However, for each individual to choose that result, he risks that his partner will rat him out, and he'll end up with 6 years instead of just 1 or 5 (by also ratting out his partner).
Since each prisoner can only control his own choices, and knows nothing of his partner's choice, his rational choice is to confess, and the end result is that both get longer jail sentences than if they had taken the risk of cooperating. Social scientists have conducted experiments on this with human subjects, and the results bear this out. People will generally avoid the risks of cooperating when the consequences of betrayal are severe.
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Applying the PD to Media Failures
Now let's picture two reporters in the White House. Each wants to get picked to ask questions during White House briefings. Overall, both know it is better to ask tough questions since this is what makes the best story. However, over time, both notice that the Administration figure at the podium tends to only ask questions of the journalist who asks easier questions. Now, each can cooperate with the other and still ask tough questions. Thus, the administration will tend to evenly distribute the questions between both. But if one chooses to ask easier questions, that one will get better treatment. But if both ask really easy questions, they will get treated equally by the administration, but neither will get to ask any hard questions.
Now, unless both reporters have a high degree of trust for one another, they will fear betrayal by their peer, and start asking easier questions than the other in order to get preferential treatment, or merely to keep up with the other in not being ignored by the Administration. It becomes a race to the bottom where neither really benefits, but neither can stop playing since the individual results will be even worse.
Of course, there are more than two reporters in the White House press pool. However, the PD still applies if you think of two prisoners as any one reporter and the other prisoner being the rest of the pool collectively. For any individual, he can choose to ask easy questions and get preferential treatment from the Administration, or he can ask tough questions and if the rest of the pool doesn't follow suit, get excluded.
Without something to keep the pool in line, the individual incentives will pull them down. In the past, there were norms of journalist ethics and civic duty which kept reporters in line. But each transgression by a reporter erodes that norm. Each time the pool witnesses one of them get singled out for special treatment, means each reporter feels that incentive more strongly come the next briefing.
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A Real World Example: Canada's Press Gallery and PM Harper
In Canada, the traditional mode of interaction between political leaders and the press was in the form of what we call a "scrum", which is where a group of reporters informally gather around a prominent politician on Parliament Hill and shout questions. It actually works pretty well. In 2006, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper's administration announced an end to scrums, instead insisting that reporters submit their names to an aide who would pick reporters to ask questions.
The press gallery reporters revolted and refused to comply. Harper held fast, and eventually one major media group, CanWest, relented and was rewarded with exclusive interviews on the Canada/US softwood lumber deal.
NYU's journalism school has more on this.
Here's the Canadian Example as a chart, in the Prisoner's Dilemma model:
So for awhile, the gallery held together, until Harper upped the incentives for betrayal by offering exlcusives on a major Canadian issue. At which point the first few bolted, and eventually the consensus crumbled and the PM had won.
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Anonymous Sourcing, another Application
So far I think it is clear how prisoner's dilemmas, and game theory in general provides some explanation for how the media have failed us so repetively despite all the best efforts of the progressive movement to push them back to objectivity and empiricism.
Let's look at the subject of the perniscious abuse of anonymous sourcing by journalists of government sources. Glenn Greenwald has been excellent in noting the all too frequent use of this tactic, particularly where the source in question is revealing nothing but information the government wants propagated. So why are they granted anonymity then? Shouldn't that be reserved for those who are risking their jobs to leak information of public concern over the wishes of their superiors? Instead, we have Karl Rove spreading lies about Iraq or "electoral math" or judicial nominees all to the benefit of his boss and Republicans.
So let's go back to our two White House reporters. The first is sitting at his desk when up walks Karl Rove, who offers him a story so long as he is not named in the article. The first reporter is an honest journalist, and tells Rove he can only grant anonymity if the information would jeapordize Rove's career and is of great public concern. Rove walks away and goes to the second reporter with the same offer. This reporter is junior, and eager for a scoop, and agrees. The information is merely government spin, but is new info, not yet published elsewhere. It appears in the next day's newspaper attributed to a "Bush Administration official."
So what has happened? The first reporter has suffered for obeying journalistic ethics while the second has been rewarded for betraying them.
What if both reporters had refused? Then Rove would be forced to choose between having the story sourced to him by name, or not having the story printed at all. Further, if over time the second reporter always agrees, and the first one always refuses, his job will be at risk since he is continually being scooped and never has original information to report. However, if he starts agreeing to Rove's requests, he will only get half the scoops and is betraying his journalistic ethics merely to keep his job.
Of course, if it really were only two reporters it would be easy for them to agree to refuse Rove's requests for anonymity. But it is many more than that, and many of them are explicitly on board with the administration ideologically. Thus, no such agreement based only on voluntary compliance and mutual trust is really practical.
Hence, the incentive to allow administration figures to spread disinformation protected by anonymity as granted by our major media organs. Each reporter can either play the game, or suffer in obscurity.
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Towards a solution
Solving this problem is a big topic, one more suited to its own entry, so here I will just essay that some form of obligatory or regulatory compulsion is needed to overcome these collective action problems. The old norms that may have kept more reporters behaving like Helen Thomas have failed. While she of course can still ask probing questions and keep her job, other reporters lacking legendary status know they are much easier to ignore and brush aside. Some means for reporters to suffer some kind of sanction for violating the ethics of journalism is needed to counteract the games. The specifics of this would be contentious, but in general, a systemic solution is required for a systemic problem, which is how we must view these media failures.
Worse, the new norms of not asking tough questions and being too complicit in granting anonymity where it is not justified are actually compounding the problem. Whereas, in a White House press pool where half the reporters ask hard questions, and the other half are sycophants, the reporter who asks tough questions merely misses out on special favours from the Administration. He does not risk being ostracized by the Administration or even his fellow reporters. Now, any reporter pushing too hard risks the disfavour of both his (jealous) peers, and payback from the Administration in the form of neve being picked to ask a question in a press conference. Even Thomas' legendary status did not save her this fate.
In the comments, I welcome proposals towards solving this systemic problem that go beyond the current methods of pushback practiced by Media Matters and other excellent netroots media critics.
Cross posted at Openleft.com