Re: market competition fails again
How about wheat, corn, soybeans, kilowatt-hours, cement, etc., etc., etc., etc.,etc., etc., etc., etc. How about vitamins, graphite electrodes, lysine, citric acid, gas turbines, large transformers? Pharmacueticals are a good example. Buying your drugs from Canada? Even the US Senate is thinking of allowing that. Gene Coyle Doug Henwood wrote: Michael Perelman wrote: exactly. On Sun, Jun 22, 2003 at 06:03:27PM -0700, Sabri Oncu wrote: Well, in the information age all we have is low marginal costs and high fixed costs, is it not? How many commodities does that apply to? There's software, entertainment products, and...? Doug
Re: market competition fails again
There is another tweak to the idea. In some cases, modern information technology has reduced the marginal cost of some superficial forms of variety. So, for example, it magazines can print something personalized for you in their advertisements or automobile companies can vary the color scheme on new cars. On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 07:25:51AM -0400, Doug Henwood wrote: Michael Perelman wrote: exactly. On Sun, Jun 22, 2003 at 06:03:27PM -0700, Sabri Oncu wrote: Well, in the information age all we have is low marginal costs and high fixed costs, is it not? How many commodities does that apply to? There's software, entertainment products, and...? Doug -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: market competition fails again
Title: RE: [PEN-L] market competition fails again Is there empirical evidence that the problem of low marginal costs and high fixed costs is so important to the economy that it changes the over-all dynamics of the economy? BTW, I hope no-one is trying to reduce _all_ of the problems of the capitalist market to this single problem. There are lots of other reasons to expect competitive markets to fail, e.g., externalities and adverse selection. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Michael Perelman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, June 23, 2003 9:07 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] market competition fails again There is another tweak to the idea. In some cases, modern information technology has reduced the marginal cost of some superficial forms of variety. So, for example, it magazines can print something personalized for you in their advertisements or automobile companies can vary the color scheme on new cars. On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 07:25:51AM -0400, Doug Henwood wrote: Michael Perelman wrote: exactly. On Sun, Jun 22, 2003 at 06:03:27PM -0700, Sabri Oncu wrote: Well, in the information age all we have is low marginal costs and high fixed costs, is it not? How many commodities does that apply to? There's software, entertainment products, and...? Doug -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: market competition fails again
Jim, you are absolutely correct on both counts. I tried to make that point in my much-maligned book, The Natural Instability of Markets. On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 09:10:12AM -0700, Devine, James wrote: Is there empirical evidence that the problem of low marginal costs and high fixed costs is so important to the economy that it changes the over-all dynamics of the economy? BTW, I hope no-one is trying to reduce _all_ of the problems of the capitalist market to this single problem. There are lots of other reasons to expect competitive markets to fail, e.g., externalities and adverse selection. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Michael Perelman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, June 23, 2003 9:07 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] market competition fails again There is another tweak to the idea. In some cases, modern information technology has reduced the marginal cost of some superficial forms of variety. So, for example, it magazines can print something personalized for you in their advertisements or automobile companies can vary the color scheme on new cars. On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 07:25:51AM -0400, Doug Henwood wrote: Michael Perelman wrote: exactly. On Sun, Jun 22, 2003 at 06:03:27PM -0700, Sabri Oncu wrote: Well, in the information age all we have is low marginal costs and high fixed costs, is it not? How many commodities does that apply to? There's software, entertainment products, and...? Doug -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: market competition fails again
Michael: I suspect that when you have a low marginal cost, high fixed cost situation, markets lead to a lowest common demoninator outcome. I would call the above the weaker form of Michael's law. The stronger form is free from the first three words. I keep using the stronger form against my debaters, some of whom are well trained economists, and usually get them confused utterly. It works best against the so-called new leftists who claim that everything has changed and we now live in the information age. Well, in the information age all we have is low marginal costs and high fixed costs, is it not? Best, Sabri
Re: market competition fails again
exactly. On Sun, Jun 22, 2003 at 06:03:27PM -0700, Sabri Oncu wrote: Well, in the information age all we have is low marginal costs and high fixed costs, is it not? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
market competition fails again
Title: market competition fails again From The war, brought to you by the White House by John Willis, Friday June 20, 2003, The Guardian: The lesson from America is that, if news and public affairs are left purely to the market, it will most likely give the government what it wants. it would be a useful to create a list of all of the different situations in which market competition leads to bad results of various sorts. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: market competition fails again
I suspect that when you have a low marginal cost, high fixed cost situation, markets lead to a lowest common demoninator outcome. On Fri, Jun 20, 2003 at 09:32:08AM -0700, Devine, James wrote: From The war, brought to you by the White House by John Willis, Friday June 20, 2003, The Guardian: The lesson from America is that, if news and public affairs are left purely to the market, it will most likely give the government what it wants. it would be a useful to create a list of all of the different situations in which market competition leads to bad results of various sorts. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: market competition fails again
- Original Message - From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] From The war, brought to you by the White House by John Willis, Friday June 20, 2003, The Guardian: The lesson from America is that, if news and public affairs are left purely to the market, it will most likely give the government what it wants. === Doesn't the above assertion naively imply that news 'makers' [the networks] ought not have Machiavellian motivations themselves, some which mesh with Gov. policies and some which don't? it would be a useful to create a list of all of the different situations in which market competition leads to bad results of various sorts. Bad results for who? Didn't the networks make some serious $ from advertisers? Just askin' Ian
Re: market competition fails again
Title: RE: [PEN-L] market competition fails again I wrote: it would be a useful to create a list of all of the different situations in which market competition leads to bad results of various sorts. Ian wries: Bad results for who? Didn't the networks make some serious $ from advertisers? for whom? for everyday people (i.e., consumers and/or workers), of course. It's true, however, that a useful exercise for students is to apply the he who pays the piper calls the tune principle to the privately-owned media, in which case the consumers are the advertisers, not the viewers. Of course, you could expand the definition of cost to say that for the viewers, the price of TV is the ads (plus the fees for cable or satellite connection, etc.) Jim
Re: market competition fails again
- Original Message - From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 9:57 AM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] market competition fails again I wrote: it would be a useful to create a list of all of the different situations in which market competition leads to bad results of various sorts. Ian wries: Bad results for who? Didn't the networks make some serious $ from advertisers? for whom? for everyday people (i.e., consumers and/or workers), of course. = Well if we're moving beyond the case suggested from your quoting of the Guardian piece, wouldn't the list be as long as all the things that go wrong with the human body as a result of living? Ian
Re: market competition fails again
Title: RE: [PEN-L] market competition fails again sure. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Ian Murray [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 10:15 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] market competition fails again - Original Message - From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 9:57 AM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] market competition fails again I wrote: it would be a useful to create a list of all of the different situations in which market competition leads to bad results of various sorts. Ian wries: Bad results for who? Didn't the networks make some serious $ from advertisers? for whom? for everyday people (i.e., consumers and/or workers), of course. = Well if we're moving beyond the case suggested from your quoting of the Guardian piece, wouldn't the list be as long as all the things that go wrong with the human body as a result of living? Ian
Re: market competition fails again
Title: RE: [PEN-L] market competition fails again Doug writes: The argument that Bourdieu made in On Television deserves wider circulation: that competition leads not to diversity, but to sameness, and not to niche marketing, but lowest-common-denominator mass marketing. He applied it to TV, but it's true of more fields than that. Frank Cook's THE WINNER-TAKE-ALL SOCIETY seems to make this argument, too. (It's a radical book in many ways, until the policy conclusions are addressed: they advocate a consumption tax to replace the income tax.) Jim
Re: market competition fails again
Devine, James wrote: From The war, brought to you by the White House by John Willis, Friday June 20, 2003, The Guardian: The lesson from America is that, if news and public affairs are left purely to the market, it will most likely give the government what it wants. it would be a useful to create a list of all of the different situations in which market competition leads to bad results of various sorts. The argument that Bourdieu made in On Television deserves wider circulation: that competition leads not to diversity, but to sameness, and not to niche marketing, but lowest-common-denominator mass marketing. He applied it to TV, but it's true of more fields than that. Doug
Re: market competition fails again
Title: RE: [PEN-L] market competition fails again Doug writes: The argument that Bourdieu made in On Television deserves wider circulation: that competition leads not to diversity, but to sameness, and not to niche marketing, but lowest-common-denominator mass marketing. He applied it to TV, but it's true of more fields than that. can I ask how B defines the lowest common denominator? and theoretically speaking, why does it prevail in TV? (I have no doubt that it does in practice, but that's another question.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: market competition fails again
Devine, James wrote: Doug writes: The argument that Bourdieu made in On Television deserves wider circulation: that competition leads not to diversity, but to sameness, and not to niche marketing, but lowest-common-denominator mass marketing. He applied it to TV, but it's true of more fields than that. Frank Cook's THE WINNER-TAKE-ALL SOCIETY seems to make this argument, too. (It's a radical book in many ways, until the policy conclusions are addressed: they advocate a consumption tax to replace the income tax.) Jim This seems like a false dichotomy to me. The issue we are dealing with is not competition versus monopoly, since the concentration of media ownership in fewer and fewer hands, which might be described as oligopoly at this point, is driven by *competition* itself. If you don't think that Clear Channel is competing ferociously to control larger and larger shares of the market, then you haven't been following recent trends. Competition is really a red herring, as far as people like Robert McChesney are concerned. His main idea is to struggle to preserve *public* voices such as the Internet before they succumb to market forces, as radio did in the 1920s. This also means fighting to keep Pacifica radio accountable to its listeners, even as PBS and NPR were causes lost ago. That being said, we are dealing with the effects of *media concentration*. Last night, PBS had a show about the emergence of FM rock jocks in the 1960s. When I lived in Boston in the early 1970s, I used to listen to a station that mixed together Bob Dylan, English folk rock, Mississippi blues and gypsy guitar on the deejay's whim. Even though this was a commercial station with a powerful signal, there was probably no more than 10 minutes worth of commercials per hour. In NYC during this period one could listen to WNCN, an all-classical station that was home to an extraordinary figure who went by the single name Watson. He came on at midnight and would play The Well Tempered Clavier in its entirety. Immediately after it was finished, he would say, That sounded so wonderful, I am going to play it again. And he did. In the 1950s, one could watch live drama two or three nights a week. Playhouse Ninety. Rod Serling's Requiem for a Heavyweight was aired there originally, as was Judgement at Nuremburg. I can say without hesitation that there is *no* made-for-tv movie from today that can compete with this. My parents subscribed to at least five magazines in the 1950s: Colliers, Look, Life, Pageant and Coronet. Ernest Hemingway was a regular contributor to Colliers and Stanley Kubrick was a photo-journalist for the relatively glitzy Look before he became a film maker. We also enjoyed the NY Post in the evening, a newspaper whose New Deal editorial viewpoint was flushed down the toilet when media mogul Rupert Murdoch took over. Okay, there is nobody on the planet more competitive than Rupert Murdoch so it begs the question to say that we are against competition as such. What we are dealing with is the crowding out of diversity as ownership is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. But to repeat: it is competition itself that is driving this process. Robert McChesney: MEDIA CONCENTRATION IS NOT A NEW PHENOMENON, but it has accelerated dramatically in the last decade, and it is taking a new and dangerous form. Classically, media concentration was in the form of horizontal integration, where a handful of firms tried to control as much production in their particular fields as possible. The U.S. film production industry, for instance, has been a tight-knit club effectively controlled by six or seven studios since the 1930s. That remains the case today: The six largest U.S. firms accounted for more than 90 percent of U.S. theater revenues in 1997. All but sixteen of Hollywood's 148 widely distributed films in 1997 were produced by these six firms, and many of those sixteen were produced by companies that had distribution deals with one of the six majors. The newspaper industry underwent a spectacular consolidation from the 1960s to the 1980s, leaving half a dozen major chains ruling the roost. U.S. book publishing is now dominated by seven firms, the music industry by five, cable TV by six. Nearly all of these are now parts of vast media conglomerates. That's why looking at specific media sectors fails to convey the extent or the nature of the system today, for no longer are media firms intent on horizontal integration. Today, they seek vertical integration, not only producing content but also owning distribution. Moreover, they are major players in media sectors not traditionally thought to be related. These conglomerates own some combination of television networks, TV show production, TV stations, movie studios, cable channels, cable systems, music companies, magazines, newspapers, and book publishing firms. This has all come about seemingly overnight. In 1983, Ben Bagdikian published The Media Monopoly (Beacon, 1984), which
Re: market competition fails again
Title: RE: [PEN-L] market competition fails again A consumption tax on luxuries, not a general consumption tax. Rather big difference there. Barkley Rosser - Original Message - From: Devine, James To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 2:28 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] market competition fails again Doug writes: The argument that Bourdieu made in On Television deserves wider circulation: that competition leads not to diversity, but to sameness, and not to niche marketing, but lowest-common-denominator mass marketing. He applied it to TV, but it's true of more fields than that. Frank Cook's THE WINNER-TAKE-ALL SOCIETY seems to make this argument, too. (It's a radical book in many ways, until the "policy conclusions" are addressed: they advocate a consumption tax to replace the income tax.) Jim
Re: market competition fails again
NY Times Magazine, June 22, 2003 THE WAY WE LIVE NOW Signals From Nowhere By WALTER KIRN I used to take a long road trip every year or two, usually in the middle of the summer, with no fixed schedule or specific destination, just a vague intention to try new foods and admire the changing scenery. And though I always took along an atlas, I rarely used it. I navigated by radio. You used to be able to do that in America: chart your course by the accents, news and songs streaming in from the nearest AM transmitter. A drawling update on midday cattle prices meant I was in Wyoming or Nebraska. A guttural rant about city-hall corruption told me I'd reach Chicago within the hour. A soaring, rhythmic sermon on fornication -- Welcome to Alabama. The music, too. Texas swing in the Southwest oil country. Polka in North Dakota. Nonstop Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Jethro Tull in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs. What's more, the invisible people who introduced the songs gave the impression that they listened to them at home. They were locals, with local tastes. I felt like a modern Walt Whitman on those drives. When I turned on the radio, I heard America singing, even in the dumb banter of ''morning zoo'' hosts. But then last summer, rolling down a highway somewhere between Montana and Wisconsin, something new happened. I lost my way, and the radio couldn't help me find it. I twirled the dial, but the music and the announcers all sounded alike, drained, disconnected from geography, reshuffling the same pop playlists and canned bad jokes. What a miserable trip. I heard America droning. Recently, I found out whom to blame: a company called Clear Channel Communications. The mammoth buyer and consolidator of hundreds of independent local radio stations -- along with its smaller competitors, Infinity Broadcasting and Cumulus Media -- is body-snatching America's sonic soul, turning Whitman's vivacious democratic cacophony into a monotonous numbing hum. No matter where a person lives these days (particularly in Minot, N.D., where Clear Channel runs all six commercial stations in town), he's probably within range of an affiliate, if not three or four, since the company buys in bulk: pop stations, rock stations, talk stations, the works. Worse, quite a few of these stations don't really exist -- not in the old sense. They're automated pods, downloading their programming from satellites linked to centralized, far-off studios where announcers who have never even set foot in Tucson, Little Rock, Akron or Boston -- take your pick -- rattle off promos and wisecracks by the hundreds, then flip a switch and beam them to your town as if they're addressing its residents personally, which they aren't. They don't even know the weather there. What results is a transcontinental shower of sound that seems to issue from heaven itself, like the edicts of the Wizard of Oz. In a way that other media companies can only dream of (though a controversial recent F.C.C. rule change permitting concentrated corporate ownership of television stations may eventually make these dreams true), Clear Channel controls its portion of the airwaves as thoroughly as Britannia once ruled the oceans. Even the F.C.C. has faced this fact, which may be why, of all the broadcast media it is allowing to clump together for market share, it made one pointed exception: radio. Clear Channel holds no monopoly by any means -- its nearly 1,250 stations represent only 10 percent or so of the national total -- but considering that the company was founded only in 1996, its growth rate is astonishing. If given another 10 years to spread unchecked, Clear Channel might cover the dial from end to end, not just in some cities, but coast to coast. America would be one big Minot then, with literally nowhere to turn except Clear Channel. This prospect might not be so troubling if radio weren't the most intensely intimate of all electronic media, forging a bond between broadcaster and listener that feels, even though it's not real, like true companionship. Though TV news anchors like to fancy themselves as guests in their audience's living rooms, they sit behind an impenetrable wall of glass that no amount of feigned eye contact can overcome. Between TV and TV land there's always a fence, but radio creates a different landscape -- open, inclusive, neighborly. When a D.J. asks a trivia question and promises concert tickets to the fifth caller who answers correctly, my urge to pick up the phone is instantaneous, as is my urge to wait to hear who won, in case I know him, and very often I do. This sense of connection is fragile, though. Bounce it off an orbiting satellite, cut it with generic pretaped humor bits, then filter it through some distant corporate headquarters, and radioland will be a land of strangers. Clear Channel's critics -- who multiply each day, it seems -- tend to come from the political left. Their big beef is the network's supposed conservative bias, which, for
Re: market competition fails again
Title: RE: [PEN-L] market competition fails again FC advocate a luxury tax? Then I forgot what they said. But my point was that their policy was pretty mild compared to the implications of their critique. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message-From: Barkley Rosser [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 12:09 PMTo: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Subject: Re: [PEN-L] market competition fails again A consumption tax on luxuries, not a general consumption tax. Rather big difference there. Barkley Rosser - Original Message - From: Devine, James To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 2:28 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] market competition fails again Doug writes: The argument that Bourdieu made in On Television deserves wider circulation: that competition leads not to diversity, but to sameness, and not to niche marketing, but lowest-common-denominator mass marketing. He applied it to TV, but it's true of more fields than that. Frank Cook's THE WINNER-TAKE-ALL SOCIETY seems to make this argument, too. (It's a radical book in many ways, until the "policy conclusions" are addressed: they advocate a consumption tax to replace the income tax.) Jim
Re: market competition fails again
Title: RE: [PEN-L] market competition fails again I wrote: Frank Cook's THE WINNER-TAKE-ALL SOCIETY seems to make this argument, too. (It's a radical book in many ways, until the policy conclusions are addressed: they advocate a consumption tax to replace the income tax.) This seems like a false dichotomy to me. The issue we are dealing with is not competition versus monopoly, since the concentration of media ownership in fewer and fewer hands, which might be described as oligopoly at this point, is driven by *competition* itself. If you don't think that Clear Channel is competing ferociously to control larger and larger shares of the market, then you haven't been following recent trends. To Marx, this was a false dichotomy, too: competition produced monopoly and monopoly produced competition, as part of an ever-changing system. The changing form of the competitive seeking of monopoly positions doesn't abolish capitalism as an exploitative, authoritarian, and alienating system. But in the context of this thread, competition means pretty much the same as neo-liberalism, i.e., loosening up government controls (as the FCC voted recently for television and radio) and the privatization of government programs (i.e. privatization of profits socialization of losses and risks). My point here was simply that _even if_ this kind of movement were successful in its official goal of increasing competition (without simply engendering increased monopoly), it would likely fail to serve people's needs. This has a lot to do with the persistence of class society that Marx pointed to. But it also has to do with some basic failings of markets that orthodox economics doesn't want to deal with seriously, e.g., the tendency for the lowest common denominator to dominate. Jim
Re: market competition fails again
Devine, James wrote: can I ask how B defines the lowest common denominator? and theoretically speaking, why does it prevail in TV? I reviewed Bourdieu's book at http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Why_TV_sucks.html. Here's a relevant bit: TV moves fast, especially commercial TV, where a minute can be worth a million dollars. In news, then, speed of thought and language are prized, meaning, says Bourdieu, no real communication can take place. Real communication, and real thought, take time; what can be done in an instant is only to pay homage to received ideas. TV loves - and it's amazing how instinctive one's idea is of just what is right or wrong for TV - fast thinkers, who aren't really thinking at all. And, as other forms of culture sell themselves, and increasingly model themselves, on TV, the more they reward the glib and telegenic, and imposing more market discipline on once highminded zones. Because they're so afraid of being boring, writes Bourdieu, [producers] opt for confrontations over debates, prefer polemics over rigorous argument, and in general, do whatever they can to promote conflict. They prefer to confront individuals...instead of confronting their arguments They direct attention to the game and its players rather than to what is really at stake, because these are the sources of their interest and expertise. The journalists, far from wanting to expose the game, are among its players and rulemakers. The reason that the press is so obsessed with the horserace aspects of political campaigns rather than the substance is because they know that it really is just a matter of personalities, since all the players, journalists included, are in agreement on the fundamental nature of the game Doug
Re: market competition fails again
Title: RE: [PEN-L] market competition fails again this makes sense. It's similar to the view (that I once heard in a US National Public Radio opinion piece) that competition on TV and the like is won by those who shout the loudest, are the most outrageous. Thus Howard Stern's success. Of course, even he can be (has been?) eclipsed by someone who's even more outrageous. Does economics have a technical term for this phenomenon? (adverse selection doesn't seem to fit...) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Doug Henwood [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 3:22 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] market competition fails again Devine, James wrote: can I ask how B defines the lowest common denominator? and theoretically speaking, why does it prevail in TV? I reviewed Bourdieu's book at http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Why_TV_sucks.html. Here's a relevant bit: TV moves fast, especially commercial TV, where a minute can be worth a million dollars. In news, then, speed of thought and language are prized, meaning, says Bourdieu, no real communication can take place. Real communication, and real thought, take time; what can be done in an instant is only to pay homage to received ideas. TV loves - and it's amazing how instinctive one's idea is of just what is right or wrong for TV - fast thinkers, who aren't really thinking at all. And, as other forms of culture sell themselves, and increasingly model themselves, on TV, the more they reward the glib and telegenic, and imposing more market discipline on once highminded zones. Because they're so afraid of being boring, writes Bourdieu, [producers] opt for confrontations over debates, prefer polemics over rigorous argument, and in general, do whatever they can to promote conflict. They prefer to confront individuals...instead of confronting their arguments They direct attention to the game and its players rather than to what is really at stake, because these are the sources of their interest and expertise. The journalists, far from wanting to expose the game, are among its players and rulemakers. The reason that the press is so obsessed with the horserace aspects of political campaigns rather than the substance is because they know that it really is just a matter of personalities, since all the players, journalists included, are in agreement on the fundamental nature of the game Doug
