Richard Posner’s forthcoming book

Eleven months ago, Richard Posner’s review of the 9-11 Commission Report appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. And lo and behold, Posner spun that review into a book of his own on homeland security, Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11. I bring this up because Judge Posner has another lead review in the NYT Book Review. So in case anyone was curious about the topic of Posner’s new book, it appears to be about the political economy of the media.

The mainstream media are predominantly liberal – in fact, more liberal than they used to be. But not because the politics of journalists have changed. Rather, because the rise of new media, itself mainly an economic rather than a political phenomenon, has caused polarization, pushing the already liberal media farther left. The news media have also become more sensational, more prone to scandal and possibly less accurate. But note the tension between sensationalism and polarization: the trial of Michael Jackson got tremendous coverage, displacing a lot of political coverage, but it had no political valence. The interesting questions are, first, the why of these trends, and, second, so what? The why is the vertiginous decline in the cost of electronic communication and the relaxation of regulatory barriers to entry, leading to the proliferation of consumer choices. Thirty years ago the average number of television channels that Americans could receive was seven; today, with the rise of cable and satellite television, it is 71. Thirty years ago there was no Internet, therefore no Web, hence no online newspapers and magazines, no blogs. The public’s consumption of news and opinion used to be like sucking on a straw; now it’s like being sprayed by a fire hose.

Go read it all — there’s a healthy number of paragraphs about blogs and the media that Glenn Reynolds discusses as well. I’ll post an update once I’ve semi-digested Posner’s analysis. UPDATE: Well, I’m still cogitating — but Laura McKenna has posted her thoughts on the matter. Be sure to check out her typology of how experts interpret the rise of the blogosphere. Meanwhile, Jack Shafer rips Posner’s essay apart in Slate. Some of it is carping, but this paragraph raises an alarm bell that also went off in my head when I first read it:

When Posner declares that media competition has pushed the established press to the left, he gives only one example: Fox News making CNN more liberal. Has Posner lost his cable connection? The success of Fox News convinced CNN of the opposite. CNN realized that the demographic that has the time and interest to watch a lot of cable news tends to be older and more conservative, as this Pew Research Center report indicates. If anything, the one-worldist CNN of founder Ted Turner has been vectoring right in recent years. Lou Dobbs, for one, now blabs a Buchananesque position on trade and immigration five nights a week. Over at MSNBC, which dumped overt liberal Phil Donahue in 2003, they’ve given every nonliberal listed in the Yellow Pages a show in hopes of boosting ratings (examples: Michael Savage, Joe Scarborough, Tucker Carlson, Jesse Ventura, and now, Rita Cosby).