Hayekian Fact-Checking
Hayek scholar Steven Horwitz applies "competition as a discovery process" to the role of blogs in checking traditional media. Here's one paragraph from the piece:
None of this should be surprising to those of us raised on Hayek. After all, this is nothing more than the intellectual version of "Competition as a Discovery Procedure." Or better yet, it is Michael Polanyi's work on "The Republic of Science" transferred to current events. Even in the blogosphere, the commentary has talked about the "distributed intelligence" of the Net, or "open source journalism," or even the "hive mind" (a bit too Borg-ish for my taste, but it makes the point). The Hayekian lesson is that it is through the ability to enter the market and compete that knowledge gets created and made socially available to others. Just as in economic competition, where the process will tend to allocate resources better than alternative processes, so in the competition to produce news does the process tend to produce the best approximation to "truth." Markets are in that way examples of liberty defeating power. The very openness and competitiveness of markets makes any momentary hold on power tenuous, requiring that those who possess it continually act affirmatively (e.g. innovating, serving consumers well) to keep it. CBS and other Big Media simply have never had to face this sort of environment before and have become sloppy as a result.
In case you missed them, traditional journalists (and, remember, I am one) are starting to dig around on the forgery story--and are finding CBS's professional standards wanting. Here's the USA Today piece and here's the Baltimore Sun.
Good journalists care intensely about avoiding mistakes, and, despite all the blogosphere media bashing, there are a lot of good journalists. (You tend to notice the ones who get stuff wrong, for obvious reasons.) Reporting is a hard job, much harder than it looks from the outside. Digging out stuff people don't want you to know--not my sort of journalism at all--is particularly difficult. But even routine feature writing or explanatory journalism is a bit of a high-wire act. By definition, you know less than your sources. The profession has, after all, been called "getting your education in public," which is one thing I love about it. But every time I write a Times column, I worry that I've gotten something wrong. The editing process can catch some errors, but not ones that require a great knowledge of the subject. For that, I have to be careful and then hope that when the article hits print neither my sources nor some Hayekian fact checker out there in reader land finds something factually wrong. (Interpretations are another matter; there, reasonable plausibility is the standard, not certainty.) Fortunately, I have a good track record--in large part because I'm paranoid about making mistakes.