Truth be told, it does feel like free markets have become a bit of a dirty word in both political realms recently; I'm not going to complain too much about Bezos advocating for it, we could use the help.
I guess it remains to be seen just what kind of views they end up pushing, rather than what he says he wants to push :P
You just throw this out there as a statement of fact without backing it up beyond citing one hypothetical failure mode of a free market for media. Here's a dueling hypothetical: what happens if the state that is in charge of regulating the media gets taken over by someone who doesn't believe that media should hold elected officials accountable and they prevent the media from covering their actions negatively?
Now that we've evened out the "what happens if"s: On what basis do you say that regulated media produces better outcomes? Because you say so? Is there evidence in favor that you can cite?
Make an argument in favor of regulated media producing better outcomes or don't, but all I've seen here so far is you and OP asserting a dogma.
You attacked the other poster's claim with a hypothetical. I rebutted yours the same way. Begging for "proof" is beyond the scope of this conversation.
Correct. I provided a dueling hypothetical precisely to illustrate that they had not provided an actual argument. I didn't intend to argue the other way—I honestly haven't formed an opinion on the topic—I just intended to point out that confidently asserting dogma isn't useful or meaningful.
What you call intuitions and principles I call dogmatic beliefs, and dogma is uninteresting to discuss in a mixed-dogma forum like this: it just devolves into a shouting match.
Well, you were the one who came to the conversation and basically did the 'shouting down' thing rather than substantively engage in anything. All you did was express your disbelief in the lowest form possible, so I'm not sure what you're really complaining about besides your own contributions here. Be the change you want to see!
That said, correlation does not imply causation, and I'm unconvinced that the polarization we're seeing now traces back that far. Pew's research [0] shows that in '94 only 21% (Rep) and 17% (Dem) of each party held a "very unfavorable" opinion of the other party. That number had barely shifted by '02, with both parties still well under 25%, but then steadily started growing from '02 on.
The timing of that is more suggestive of the internet being a cause (if we're going to try to pin it down to one media-oriented cause, which is probably a bad exercise to begin with) than it does of the fairness doctrine, which was repealed back in '87.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/08/09/as-partisan-...
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/topic-guide/fairness-...
Since the Fairness Doctrine was struck down, we've had nothing but bad media outcomes.
If you want to know more, Noam Chomsky wrote the book on this, called Manufacturing Consent.
I agree that this was interesting to do, but Telegram and Reddit are not high quality media. Some people with high levels of media literacy can distill the information gained through such channels to understand the world, but a lot of people cannot. Most people still use legacy media (even if it is through digital channels) as primary sources. And those legacy media sources are worse than ever.
On top of that the digital channels are massively astroturfed, especially those whose consumer base are in the west. For example, the state of the war as described by Western-targetted media vs. Ukrainian-targetted sources differs greatly. Same applies for the Hamas-Israel conflict. We need high quality and impartial (for some definition of impartial) sources to complement the raw feed for people with lower media literacy. Substack is great but not enough when Fox News and MSNBC exist.
Says who? Back in the day people made a big deal about how Wikipedia was a low quality source of information until it turned out to be by far the best public repository of information humanity has ever seen and one of the best institutions ever built for neutral and informative coverage of various issues.
Reddit is a fantastic resource too. It sometimes gets long-form discussion involving domain experts and is much better at representing multiple viewpoints than any pre-internet media channel (which, given the bias of the major subreddits, is pretty amazing).
Matter of fact the owners of the platform take part in astroturfing as a part of day to day business — see the moderation takeover.
Reddit having flaws doesn't make it low quality. The baseline for media companies is well below sea level.
2. Again, the situation that we’re in is not natural, it is a reality that was created by political and ideological extremists. You’re talking about insane levels of media corruption as if it is a natural and unavoidable phenomenon, but it’s not. We can change it.
You just linked an entire article with, realistically, some pretty detailed analysis of how the Harris campaign was interacting with Reddit. There are details of what was said, who said it, where it was said, how much was said. Experiments were conducted. Dates, times and strategies are being publicised.
Link me that for the Harris campaign's interactions with CNN or the New York Times. There is nowhere near as much information floating around as far as I have seen - people have to guess.
> had to go to Ukrainian media and military sources through Substack and elsewhere to get a non-propagandized sense of things.
I'm just going to pick this up on the way through - that is not the right move; Ukraine is in an active war! There is little hope their media is reporting things accurately. Countries in war, particularly losing wars, are notorious for presenting a warped view of the war situation.
And there are strong suspicions that the Ukraine media is a wing of the US propaganda machine, one of the things that came up during USAID was the remarkable amount of foreign funding for media that flows through Ukraine [0].
> You’re talking about insane levels of media corruption as if it is a natural and unavoidable phenomenon, but it’s not. We can change it.
It is and you can't. The only thing that has changed in recent years is that there are alternative voices being heard that are alerting people to just how bad the media situation is. I'm not seeing any evidence the quality of the media has changed in the last [insert time period], but wow the amount of transparency has jumped up since around the 2000s.
[0] https://imi.org.ua/en/news/oksana-romaniuk-90-of-ukrainian-m...
Free market views aren't better because they have some theoretical purity; they work much better than all the other options. Anyone who approaches the world trying to get the best results will end up with strong free market views. The free market is almost a magic fountain of wealth and prosperity. The people who want to improve the world are hard ones to shut up; they keep talking. And they don't even need to be in contact with each other to figure out market principles - they're matters of observing human behaviour, not learned ideologies.
...or so one would hope. The fact that Fox News had to go back to supporting Trump because they were losing people to Newsmax unfortunately seems to be a counterexample.
That would be an example of the market pushing towards "being stupid and advancing stupid news".
This is exactly what is called a "market failure": Where the natural market forces push companies into making decisions which are bad for everyone -- bad for themselves, bad for their customers, bad for society as a whole. That's exactly what regulation is meant to address.
After WW2, no doubt in part after seeing how the Nazi party used broadcast medium to subvert discussion, the FCC instituted what they called the "Fairness Doctrine", which "required holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints." [1] This was eliminated in 1987.
Imagine how different the world would be if both Fox News and MSNBC were required to have people on both sides of the aisle have their say about all the political hot topics; and if Fox News didn't have to worry that doing so would cause an exodus to Newsmax, because Newsmax (perhaps once they reached a certain size) would be required to do the same thing.
That's not true at all. Someone can simply buy all the media, and the free market will not correct that as long as that person has the wealth to persist.
The free market has a large number of failure modes, as evidenced by the fact that every free market in the world has some regulations of some sort. Antitrust foremost among them. Pretending it does not is just adherence to dogma.
Do you have an example of that happened in real life? Not just a hypothesis. When was a person being wealthy enough to buy all the media?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IHeartMedia makes it sound like this was any old media company and ended up going bankrupt.
You can only buy "all the media" when there is a high barrier to entry, and with the internet, the barrier to entry is basically zero.
ALL markets are BORN of regulations. A market is what emerges when you lay some shared ground rules: here's what a pound is, here's a standard currency, here's some laws about commerce, here's a court system for mediating disputes.
So the question isn't ever really about free or not free—it's what are the rules and who sets them
99 out of 100 times the people spending money pushing the virtue of a "free market" really just want to be the ones setting the rules and steering them in their favor
Replace "free market" with "competitive market"—what most people actually want when they talk about free markets—and suddenly a lot of what Bezos is going to argue for stops making sense
That people seek to use an idea to garner support for their agenda without embodying that idea is nothing new. Just see current American politics.
I wish this was recognized more widely. I feel like the public versus private thing is kind of a red herring; the real issue is competition and cultivating it. Sometimes this means the public intervening in various ways (to support individuals in their skill development and ability to take risks, or break up monopolies, offer a competitive alternative in a public service, etc.) and sometimes it means the public stepping out (as when public regulations stifle true competition or a public service exerts too much control over pricing and services).
Capitalism is useful, like fire is useful. You just need to be careful to keep your fire under control and doing useful things.
I also note that the examples of regulations you give are all regularly agreed upon voluntarily without some higher (i.e. state) power telling them to.
Financial markets have conventions, for example, because they're useful, not just because some lawyer in an agency says jump.
Haven't we seen for the last 10 years exactly what will happen in this situation? I mean, not through the free market, but the deep state pretty much had complete control over the narrative of 90% of the media, from Covid to border policy.
And the stronger the control, the less trust people have in these media, and at the end of the day the election results are no longer decided by who is clearly supported by 90% of the news media, but by who came to Joe Rogan's podcast.
To Bezos, a market controlled by a single large capital allocator is a free market. Unless the allocator is government of course (unless there's subsidies to apply for!).
The idea to me is strange; I shop on Amazon, but also dozens of other online websites. It's really not hard to buy from some place other than Amazon if you desire.
Many of the same effects that make it extremely hard to set up eg. competing social networks are not present for online shopping - There's plenty of shipping companies, so you can ship anywhere in the world without capital investment; You can set up an online shop and send it to anyone, you don't need to have a huge customer base to make money (relatively speaking, obviously you need customers)
The motivation for DOGE is not efficiency. It is destruction of the federal civil service and destruction of oversight for Musk's business empire.
I don't believe Bezos' motivation is honest. For God's sake, he is saying "I will silence opinions that do not align with my own; I am narrowing the intellectual capacity of this organization".
It's also loaded. He doesn't give examples of opinion pieces or a trend of speaking against free markets (so-called) or personal liberties.
It is now the personal opinion section of Jeff Bezos. Look what money can buy.
that's not the issue here though. Bezos is directly ordering the opinion editor to tow a certain line, and that is not a common practice at any reputable newspaper I am aware of (which is why the responsible editor, David Shipley immediately quit). I am German and I have friends working in the news sector. A corporate shareholder trying to dictate the topics would be considered a breach of ethics. Pretty sure that's the case at highly regarded newspapers in the US too.
That somehow a lack of regulations is fair because it allows markets to adjust to supply and demand and come to an equilibrium. And modern economists who use actor-based simulations have shown that unregulated markets are typically not "perfect markets".
But the reality is that a market with a monopolist does not do this. In fact, the closer you get to a pure monopoly, the more a price will approach one where consumers get none of the economic surplus and there is a large economic dead-weight loss.
Unsurprisingly, the tech giants who are monopolists talk a lot about "free markets" in this way. But people who work in tech should probably refrain from using this term so that we can get rid of these superstitions.
This is my single most important heuristic for filtering news. Facts in the present and the past matter. Predictions about the future have very little value.
Jon Stewart said it better. This whole show is 10/10 but linking to the most relevant timestamp: https://youtu.be/CuDcTyCq8nc?si=eiVXnJkfMxPGPv5k&t=812
That position is widely supported in the professional news media, including the Wall Street Journal.
[1]: https://newrepublic.com/post/191606/tom-homan-ocasio-cortez-...
Oddly, I'd say its basically only Trump attacking the idea in any significant way, with the strong advocacy of tariffs. It remains bizarre to me that conservatives have seemed happy to throw away generations of advocacy for free trade.
I don't expect Bezos to contradict him either.
There's more rhetoric nowadays around things like rent controls and profit caps, both of which I view as very destructive to the mechanisms of market allocation. I think it's a divisive issue though since there's no real home these days for people with those views (that is, (neo)liberal economics); the right is insane and the left have a large, very progressive segment which they have to pull back on.