PUBLIC GOODS, THE FCC, CANDY AND GUNS.

The FCC is planning to relax restrictions on ownership of multiple media in the same market. You can read about the details in a WaPo article here. For an excellent back-and-forth between duelling experts -- Harold Feld and Bruce Fein -- you should clear an hour of your schedule and listen to today's Diane Rehm show (should be available through this link). Syracuse University professor Robert Tompson had an excellent editorial on this issue in WaPo this weekend as well, here. See also this link at Amy Campbell's weblog for links to an online petition.

The details of the proposal are important. Equally important, however, is how one approaches the issue of civic knowledge. In particular, it seems to me useful to think of the issue as primarily a question of whether or not you believe that an informed citizenry is a public good, and if you do believe this, how the provision of this public good can best be accomplished. It's pretty standard in some political science literature to look at an informed citizenry as a public good -- democracy cannot function well if people are uninformed, and a more informed citizenry is likely to make better voting and advocacy decisions, and the benefits of an informed citizenry accrue to all. But there are serious problems with respect to the incentives that any individual has to become well informed on political matters. Entry costs can be high, people lead busy lives, the marginal benefit of an additional hour spent learning about politics is generally negligible, and the temptations to free ride are ubiquitous. Legislatures know about these problems in the provision of the public good of an informed citizenry, and that is why they put introduction to American government courses on the core curriculum and essentially force students to listen to professors like me.

The structure of the good is interesting, though. Imagine, if you will, a defense industry that was structured so that its technology had dual use and could produce only the following two products: candy and big guns. And let's imagine that someone proposed that we let market forces determine whether or not defense companies produced one or the other and the precise mix that they would produce them in. And let's further imagine that someone had the idea that defense is either not a public good and hence should be produced in the market (and the nasty state should get off the backs of the defense industry already!), or that it may be a public good but should be produced wholly through market forces nonetheless, perhaps because we "believe in a free market," or because the defense industry "has made the investments and should be free to make its own business decisions," or something like that. And let's also imagine that candy is much more profitable to produce than big guns.

In such a fanciful world, there will be pressure to produce candy over big guns and big guns will be underproduced.

I've stacked the deck here, of course, but I think that the analogy is accurate. The first big step in an analysis of media ownership must turn on whether or not you really believe that an informed citizenry is a public good. I certainly got the sense that Harold Feld believed that. I'm not so sure about Bruce Fein and the anti-restriction folks. Cato, for example, seems to see the issue of media ownership as one of consumer choices.

The second big step is in relating diversity of viewpoints to the production of the public good of an informed citizenry. The FCC would be wise to still be concerned about protecting diversity of ownership, given continued patterns of media consumption. Contra this opinion journal piece, as far as I understand the data, the technological revolution in information technology had not actually occured for most people yet, and even when it does, information overload will become a problem. More choices of candy does nothing to produce the public good of an informed citizenry. Given the disincentive that people have to become informed, they will predictably use shortcuts to information; we shouldn't rely on the fact of multiple channels of information if we want to produce an informed citizenry -- instead, we should reflect on what sources are already "ready-to-hand" for a majority of people. (Read also this post at Lawrence Lessig's blog.) A reliance on anti-trust laws alone skirts the underlying issue of the theoretical difference between protecting consumer choice (the reason for anti-trust) and protecting the public's ability to become politically informed, with all of the additional complexity that seeing an informed citizenry as a public good brings with it. The problem is not just that we want cheaper candy; the problem is that we want to lower the cost of consumption of big guns instead of candy, to continue my analogy.

For more views on the FCC rules, see this article at Taxing Thoughts, and interesting post on "Reading Rainbow" at Ruminate This. And see especially this Online Journalism Review article on the Canadian experiences with media consolidation.

MORE: I realize that this post doesn't really get at the issue of whether or not the proposed rule changes are a good thing. The point here is to express my frustration at the fact that the idea of an informed citizenry as a public good is not something that is very prevalent in the debate. Media ownership can't be analyzed simply from the perspective of antitrust laws (as Bruce Fein seems to think), at least from the perspective of the antitrust laws as I understand it. The problem is not simply that collusion and consolidation could lead to higher prices. The question should be approached from the issue of what sort of media structure is necessary so that citizens can be well informed. And there is a case to be made that neither extensive media consolidation nor simple reliance on new and shiny technologies will be sufficient to achieve that goal. And the First Amendment rights of broadcasters (like Clear Channel) -- in particular when these rights are tied to a profit motive -- should not be at the forefront here; not that they shouldn't be considered, but they're far from being the most important issue.