mass-communication-theory

106 Section 2 The Era of Mass Society and Mass Culture
According to the marketplace-of-ideas theory, the laissez-faire doctrine should
be applied to mass media; that is, if ideas are “traded” freely among people, the
correct or best ideas should prevail. The ideas compete, and the best will be
“bought.” They will earn profits that will encourage others to compete and market
similar good ideas. Bad ideas will have no buyers and thus there will be no incentive
to produce and market them. But there are some difficulties in applying this
logic to our large contemporary media. Media content is far less tangible than
other consumer products. The meaning of individual messages can vary tremendously
from one person to the next. Just what is being traded when news stories
or television dramas are “bought” and “sold”? When we buy a newspaper, we
don’t buy individual stories; we buy packages of them bundled with features like
comics and horoscopes. We can choose to ignore anything in the package that we
find offensive. But there is no direct connection between our purchase of the paper
and the fact that we may or may not find some useful ideas in it. When we watch
television, we don’t pay a fee to the networks. Yet buying and selling are clearly involved
with network programs. Advertisers buy time on these shows and then use
the programs as vehicles for their messages. When they buy time, they buy access
to the audience for the show; they do not necessarily buy the rightness or correctness
of the program’s ideas. Sponsors pay more to advertise on programs with
large or demographically attractive audiences, not for programs with better ideas
in them. Clearly, the media marketplace is a bit more complicated than the marketplace
for refrigerators or toothpaste, as you can investigate in the box entitled
“Which Model of the Marketplace?”
In the American media system, the marketplace of ideas was supposed to work
like this: Someone comes up with a good idea and then transmits it through some
form of mass communication. If other people like it, they buy the message. When
people buy the message, they pay for its production and distribution costs. Once
these costs are covered, the message producer earns a profit. If people don’t like
the message, they don’t buy it, and the producer goes broke trying to produce and
distribute it. If people are wise message consumers, the producers of the best
and most useful messages will become rich and develop large media enterprises,
and the producers of bad messages will fail. Useless media will go out of business.
If the purveyors of good ideas succeed, these ideas should become more easily
available at lower cost. Producers will compete to supply them. Similarly, the cost
of bad ideas should rise and access to them should diminish. Eventually, truth
should win out in the marketplace of ideas, just as it should triumph in the public
forum envisioned by the early Libertarians. According to marketplace-of-ideas theory,
the self-righting principle should apply to mass media content as well as to
public debate.
The marketplace of ideas is self-regulating, so there is no need for a government
agency to censor messages. Audiences won’t buy bad messages, and therefore
irresponsible producers will go out of business. But what if advertiser support permits
bad messages to be distributed for free? Will people be less discriminating if
they don’t have to pay directly to receive these messages? What if the bad messages
are distributed as part of a large bundle of messages (e.g., a newspaper or television
news program; a package of cable television channels)? If you want the good messages,
you also pay to subsidize the bad messages. What is bad for you might be
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