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>> 137 5 Where Can We Go? Consuming Responsibly If the public at large didn’t agree with your choices, you’d be out of business. It’s a funny thing. . . . It’s the appearance of power versus the reality of power. It looks like as if you have a lot of power over what you put on your show. But you don’t. Because if you didn’t appeal to the public, if these people don’t like you—you do a marvelous job—I’m not questioning that. You do a marvelous job because you have found an audience for your product. —Milton Friedman, 1980 I opened this book with a quotation by a long-time journalist, Ted Koppel . The essay from which the quotation came expressed Koppel’s dire concerns about the influence of the market on news coverage. This closing chapter opens with the above quotation by Nobel Prize winner and world-renowned economist Milton Friedman, who made this remark as a guest on the Phil Donahue Show. As Friedman’s banter with long-time talk show host Phil Donahue indicates, although they both agree that markets drive the media, his vantage point is far different from Koppel’s. Friedman, a strong proponent of free markets, would not be bothered by the freedom that news firms have in chasing market demands. Koppel, on the other hand, spent years in journalism and claims to be guided by long-established traditional journalistic norms. Of course, we would not expect an economist’s view of the news to reflect the professed journalistic norms of the news profession, but it is instructive to see how 138 > 139 Such market mechanisms are always with us, and always working. However, these mechanisms are not always readily apparent at any given moment. People can easily see the media outlets that operate prominently , and perhaps conclude that those outlets possess some form of magical staying power that makes them impervious. Unfortunately, people can’t readily see the scores of media firms that have gone out of business over the decades. Even when large and long-respected news outlets cease to exist, people mourn their passing and move on, the nonexistent company much farther out of mind than their current available choices of news. Thus, at any given time, news producers might appear strong, in charge, hegemonic, and in no way hampered by such minor nuisances as public opinion, consumer demand, and free choice. But such a vantage point ignores the growing mass of evidence that points to the power of the consumer over news content. In chapter 1, I laid out the broad strokes of how market forces affect news content. I contrasted this against other proposed explanations of news content. In short, other models explaining news content simply do not adequately account for the fact that news outlets must compete for audiences in a free capitalistic market. There is little doubt that to explain all of news content, many perspectives have to be accounted for. But, in understanding news, we should focus on the theories and explanations that have the most explanatory power. There is little doubt that the biases of news firm owners, producers , editors, and journalists also seep into news coverage—recent evidence makes this clear. But, this only happens as the market allows. Conservative journalists will have the opportunity to reach larger audiences in “live free or die” New Hampshire than they would in socialist utopia Vermont. Many of Fox News’ journalists and commentators have personal ideologies in line with their product’s ideological reputation, but imagine a situation in which FNC’s conservative audience disappeared to be replaced by a liberal audience. To stay employed and in business, the journalists and commentators at Fox would have to change their coverage immediately, despite their personal preferences, to meet the demands of the altered market. In this way, journalistic sincerity is 140 > 141 reality but because they have been defined as “newsworthy” by those whose job it is to identify potential news items and to transform them to appeal to the needs of both media officials and media audiences. The “War on Terror” was a huge story from 2001 through 2008. At that point, the war took a back seat to a series of other, supposedly more important stories. Troops were still being killed, and the United States faced the same challenges it had in previous years. But somehow, news addressing the war on terror faded into the background. This change in...

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