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Here is another reason. Some analysts consider that the market also fails because of low demand. Even if suppliers could "earn all their money", they wouldn't provide the socially optimal amount of info! Private demand for political info will never be the same as social demand. And it will never reflect its full social value.
If it were true, that political information was regularly underproduced by the market, there would be cause for serious concern that might well justify generous sibsidies - in the form of freedom from liability for the harms they cuase - for information providers. But a proper look at modern market shows that producers of political information have developed a wide range of strategies for increasing the benefits of their efforts to solve the public good problem.
The most obvious example of a spontaneously generated market solution to the public good problem is ADVERTISING. By providing revenue in proportion to the relative size of the audience (for radio & TV) or the readership (for magazines & newspapers), advertisers play a SIGNIFICANT role in the internalizing process. In
effect, the sale of advertising at a price that varies according to the number of recipients permits information producers to appropriate the benefits of providing a product that many people value but few would pay for directly. Advertising has an effect of transforming information from a public into a private good. It makes possible for information providers to make profits by satisfying the tastes of large audiences for whose desire to consume information they are unable to charge directly.
Thus, customer of goods or services and citizen of any country - are in the same conditions. Like customers - citizens may have (and they have) different preferences for political information, but citizens do not value information about politics only because it contributes to their ability to vote intelligently and customers do. Like customers - citizens' tastes differ in many ways and that generate wide variations in the intensity of their demand for political information.
Since it does not appear to be true, that political information market is blocked by an ongoing problem of undersupply, the conventional justification for granting the press broad freedom from legal liability for the harms it causes must give away! It does not necessarily mean that the economic case for legal sanctions has been made. Although it seems the market could be relied upon to supply "enough" information. So that subsidies in the form of protection from legal liability are not needed. Personal responsibility and legal accountability would be 100% if the information market could internalize to producers not only the benefits but also the costs of their activities & failures. As for victims, they'll get one more chance to avoid the harms happened from the production of defective information.
Legal accountability for harm is desirable in a market that systematically fails to punish "unfair" producers for defective products. This kind of failure occurs in two quite different cases:
1) The first occasion has to do with the market's responsiveness to the demands of consumers. The failure occurs when customers are unable to detect defects before purchase or to protect themselves by taking appropriate precautions after purchase, when they are unable to translate their willingness to pay for nondefective products into a demand that some producers will satisfy and profit from. It also occurs when suppliers are unable to gain any competitive ad- vantage either by exposing defects in their rivals' products or by touting the relative merits of their own.
2) The second kind of market failure is an inability to internalize harm to bystanders - third parties who have no dealings with the producers but who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when a product malfunctions. Even when these kinds of failures occur, legal accountability is problematic if it in turn entails inevitable error in application or requires the taking of such costly precautions that they cover up all benefits.
Conceiving of quality as a function of accuracy, relevance and comple- teness, consumers of political information are not in a strong position when it comes to detecting quality defects in the political information they receive. Revelance may well be within their ken, but since they are quite unable to verify for themselves either the accuracy or the completeness of any particular account of political events. In addition, since political information usually comes bundled with other entertainment and news features that sustain their loyality to particular suppliers, consumers are not inclined to punish information producers by avoiding future patronage even when they commit an occasional gross error.
Реферат опубликован: 5/09/2006