Should press be liable or not?
Since it does not appear to be true, that political information market is blocked by an ongoing problem of undersupply, the conventional justification for granting the press broad freedom from legal liability for the harms it causes must give away! It does not necessarily mean that the economic case for legal sanctions has been made. Although it seems the market could be relied upon to supply "enough" information. So that subsidies in the form of protection from legal liability are not needed. Personal responsibility and legal accountability would be 100% if the information market could internalize to producers not only the benefits but also the costs of their activities & failures. As for victims, they'll get one more chance to avoid the harms happened from the production of defective information.
Legal accountability for harm is desirable in a market that systematically fails to punish "unfair" producers for defective products. This kind of failure occurs in two quite different cases:
) The first occasion has to do with the market's responsiveness to the demands of consumers. The failure occurs when customers are unable to detect defects before purchase or to protect themselves by taking appropriate precautions after purchase, when they are unable to translate their willingness to pay for nondefective products into a demand that some producers will satisfy and profit from. It also occurs when suppliers are unable to gain any competitive ad vantage either by exposing defects in their rivals' products or by touting the relative merits of their own. 2) The second kind of market failure is an inability to internalize harm to bystanders third parties who have no dealings with the producers but who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when a product malfunctions. Even when these kinds of failures occur, legal accountability is problematic if it in turn entails inevitable error in application or requires the taking of such costly precautions that they cover up all benefits.
Conceiving of quality as a function of accuracy, relevance and completeness, consumers of political information are not in a strong position when it comes to detecting quality defects in the political information they receive. Revelance may well be within their ken, but since they are quite unable to verify for themselves either the accuracy or the completeness of any particular account of political events. In addition, since political information usually comes bundled with other entertainment and news features that sustain their loyality to particular suppliers, consumers are not inclined to punish information producers by avoiding future patronage even when they commit an occasional gross error.Nevertheless, competition among journalists and publishers of political information tends to create an environment that is in general more conductive to accuracy than to lies or half-truths. Journalistic careers can be made by exposing others' errors, and they can be ruined when a journalist is revealed to be careless about truth. These realities create incentives for journalists not to make mistakes.
Moreover, the investment that mainstream publishers and broadcas ters make in their reputations for thoroughness and accuracy attests to the market's perceived ability to detect and reward suppliers of consistently highquality information. Information suppliers that cater to more specialized tastes play a significant role. These alternative ways of getting info are often probe apparent realities more deeply, interprete events with greater sophistication and analyse data more thoroughly than the mainstream media are inclined to do.
In doing so, of course, their principal motivation is to satisfy their own customers. But while pursuing this goal, they constrain (even if they do not completely eliminate) the mainstream media's ability to portray falsehood as truth or to OMIT key facts from otherwise apparently compelete pictures.
The array of incentives with respect to at least the general quality of political information, with which the market confronts information providers creates systematic tendencies for them to provide political info that is accurate and complete. Or perhaps it would be slightly more precise to say that the market unfortunately does not appear systematically to reward producers of falsehood or half-truth information yet, according to their activities. So that consumers of political information don't need the club of legal liability to force information providers to provide them with quality information.
The analysts ought not to be read as an asserting that the reason the market for political information works well is that it provides just the right kind and quality of information to each individual citizen and that each individual citizen has identical preferences for info about government. Indeed, the premise of this argument is that the market works because citizens (or customers) do not have identical preferences and producers exploit that fact by finding to cater to and profit from the varying demands of a diverse citizenry. An implicit assumption provides the normative underpinnings for the analysis. Obviously, the full implications of this assumption cannot be worked out here.
The claim that the market in general "works" shouldn't be understood as a claim that the information it generates is uniformly edifying and never distorted. As you know many information producers pander to the public's appetite for scandal and still others see to it. These facts do not warrant the conclusion that the market doesn't work.
More significantly, it seems inconceivable that any system of government regulation including a system in which information producers are liable for "defective" information could in fact systematically generate a flow of political information that consistently provided more citizens with the quality and quantity that met their own needs as they themselves defined than does the competition in the marketplace of ideas that we presently enjoy.
This analysis suggests that the workings of the market create situation in which consumers of political information do not need the threat of producer liability to guarantee that they are systematically getting a TRUSTWORTHY product.
But consumers are not the only potential victims of defective information and market incentives are not always adequate to protect NONCONSUMER victims from the harm of defective information. Innocent bystanders, such as pedestrians hit by defective motorcycles, are sometimes hurt by products over whose producers they have no control either as consumers or competitors. Persons, who find themselves the unwitting subjects of defective information, stand in an analogous position.
For example, a story about sexual assault might be very interesting for public and might serve well the public interest in being informed about the police efforts or criminal justice system.
But the victim's name is NOT NECESSARY to its purpose and its publication both invades her privacy and broke her safety. In cases like this, it's not so easy to have confidence in market incentives. The harm from the defect is highly concentrated on the single defamed or exposed individual.