Cost and choice in the media

The Richard Posner piece in the New York Times has got a lot of attention.Butler Shaffer comes to a similiar conclusion but is much more politically incorrect than Posner:

In our vertically-structured world, the institutional order is – by definition – the “center” from which to measure the substantial deviations that represent “extremism.” Because the Internet allows for the open, unrestrained flow of information, it provides a challenge to the centralized control of facts and ideas. Because people’s thinking is thus moved away from the center, the Internet will become an “extremist” system with which the state must deal. The cliché is already in place: “since anyone can put anything out on the Internet, how do we know what to believe?” That major media outlets have been caught up in their own distorted, exaggerated, and falsified reports, while a president and his advisors routinely lie to the public, it would seem appropriate to suggest that everyone ought to question every bit of information presented to them, whatever the source.

The free flow of information and ideas has always been the principal force for the dispersion of power that defines a free society. If power is to be kept at the center – which is where the established order has always insisted it remain – information must be restricted. State officials will tell you all that they want you to know and that you need to know – which, in their view, amounts to the same thing. The government will expand its means of obtaining information about you – whether from surveillance, spying, computer records, wiretaps, RFID tags, etc. – while keeping information about itself from your awareness (all in the interest of “national security,” of course). Censorship, resort to “classified information,” and appeals to “media responsibility,” will be looked upon as necessary to the maintenance of “social order.”