This blog post is my reaction to the article Did Capitalism Give Us The Laugh Track? in The Freeman July/August 2013 issue. The article's main point is that the laugh track in television comedies, e.g. sitcoms, is ugly and stupid, and its widespread use was a flaw due to homogeneity caused by the fact that FCC regulations gave an oligopoly to the broadcast radio stations (ABC, CBS and NBC), and the laugh track was done in by evolution and innovation caused by the rise of free market competition in television, first with Fox and then with cable TV like HBO.
This article highlights a point that is hotly debates among the general public: what is the solution to the horrible, atrocious quality problem in the media? Most people agree that the most of the news shows on the media are stupid and offer cliched, hackneyed tripe, not deep, biting insight. Not surprisingly, the Left and the Right differ in their characterization of the problem, and in their proposed solution. The Left says that the profit motive drives news stations like CNN (and Fox News) to dumb down their news and turn the news into entertainment in order to get higher ratings. To the Left, the media can only improve if the profit motive is removed and the news is made into a public good, like PBS or the BBC. The Left in particular criticizes Fox News for being biased and stupid. The Right makes an argument not unlike Freeman author B.K. Marcus, that the government-sponsored FCC-administered monopolization of the media has stifled innovation, and the solution is deregulation and competition to improve quality. The Right complains that networks like CNN and MSNBC have a liberal agenda and view all policy debates through a Leftist lens.
In any political analysis which pits libertarian policy vs. statist policy, it is interesting to speculate about whether the findings lead to the conclusions as the result of empirical research, or whether the analysis uses a priori assumptions which conform the data to fit the desired result. The former is a neutral unbiased analysis, whereas the latter is bias contaminating the research. Can we say that the FCC helped the laugh track, or was it the low taste of the public that contributed to the laugh track? In the absence of empirical data capable of distinguishing these two possibilities with precision, we cannot achieve an answer to this question that possesses scientific certainty.
But in the case of freedom vs. tyranny in explaining the "Lamestream Media", reality is handing us something that approximates a neutral scientific experiment. This is, obviously, the internet, and podcasts and Youtube channels as independent media. The government has not yet shackled the internet media with regulatory controls, so independent internet media has the chance to break free from conformity and be innovative. If the Right interpretation is correct, then internet-based competition will produce lean, hungry new media stations which will abandon stupid shallow news shows and two-dimensional biases in favor of deep, honest, insightful analysis, and the free market will reward the new media, and the good media feeds will prosper and evolve and improve. But if the Left interpretation is correct then the profit motive will afflict new media just as it did old media, with the need for ads and ratings driving down the intelligence of the analysis. As a libertarian I predict that the evolution of media to an internet-based mode will lead to competition among thousands of news feeds, which will destroy the "lamestream" mainstream media and break the news free from the orthodox conformist paradigm through which the news is filtered in the process of being taught to the news-consuming public. Indeed, the internet is bringing new libertarian media like The Freeman of FEE, as well as other libertarian media like Reason Magazine and Liberty Magazine, to the attention of people who would never have had access to it in the absence of the internet. Internet media will enable libertarian news feeds to compete with the mainstream statist news feeds, and let the public, not the experts, decide whose accounts of the facts are most trustworthy. The eventual result of whether or not media enrichment happens once we fully transition to an internet-based media model will be a scientific proof supporting either the Right (if media gets better) or Left (if it does not) interpretation of what is wrong with the media.
