Реферат: Should be press liable or not

— 1 -

SHOULD PRESS BE LIABLE OR NOT?

Recent years have increased legalaccountability of producers and

advertisers for providing SAFE products andRELIABLE information to

customers. A government influences a wide range of market

operations from licensing requirements to contract actions. That

control announces and enforces determinednorms of quality.

Each of these regulations is designed to protect consumers from

being hurt or CHEATED by defects in thegoods and services they buy.

This matter, when producers look to the law rather than to the

market to establish and maintain newstandards of quality (of their

goods), shows, that modern market has an ability of selfregulation.

But it also shows another unbelievablefeature: consumers are both

incapable of rationally assessing risks and unaware of their own

ignorance.

Companies and corporations all over theworld are systematically

inclined to SHIRK on quality and that without the threat oflegal

liability may subject their customers orother people to serious risk

of harm from their products if it couldsave money by doing so.

According to this point of view, for most goods and services,

consumers are POWERLESS to get producers tosatisfy their demand for

safe, high-quality products! The unregulated market lets unfair

producers to pass on others the costs oftheir mistakes.

Legal liability is ready to correct these «market failures» by

creating a special mechanism (feedback), regulating relations

between producers and customers. Unfairproducers should be punished

and their exposure is increasing.

One market,however, has completelyESCAPED the imposition of legal

liability. The market for political information remains genuinely

— 2 -

free of legally imposed quality obligations. The electronic mass

media are subject to more extensivegovernment regulation than paid

media, but in their role as suppliers of political information,

nothing is required to meet any externally established quality

standards.

In fact, those, who gather and report the news, have no legal

obligations to be competent, thorough or disinterested. And those,

who publish or broadcast it, have no legalobligation to warrant its

truthfulness, to guarantee its relevance, to assure its

completeness.

The thing is: Should the politicalinformation they provide fail,

for example, to be truthful, relevant, or complete, the costs of

this failure will not be paid by press. Instead they will be borne

by the citizens. Should the information intrude theprivacy of an

individual or destroy without justification an individual's

reputation — again, the cost will not beborne by producer of it.

This side of «activity»of producers of harmful or defective

information (goods, services, etc) practically is notacknowledged.

Producers of most goods and services are considered worlds APART

from the press in kind, not just in degree. Holding producers in

ordinary markets to ever higher standardsof liability is seen as

PROCOMSUMER. Proposing holding the press to any standard of

liability for political information is seenas ANTIDEMOCRATIC. The

press is constitutionally obligated tocheck on the government.

Most of policymakers justify legalliability for harms, caused by

goods and services and quite limitedliability for harms, caused by

information. Liability for defectiveconsumer products is PREDICATED

on a market failure. As for «unfair» producers, power of possible

profits PREVENT consumers from translating their true preferences

for safety and quality into effective demand. So, customer

preferences remain outside the safety and quality decision-making

process of producers. Today, it'll be a new mechanism to force

producers to follow customers truepreferences.

— 3 -

Lack of liability for defective or harmful politicalinformation

can be predicated only on a different kindof supposed market failure

— not a failure of the market to SUPPLY the LEVEL of safetythat

customers want but its failure tosupply the amount of political

information that society should have. Some experts say, that free

market has tendency to produce«too little» correct information,

especially political information.

The thing is: political informationis a public good and it has

many characteristics of a public good. Thatis a product that many

people value and use but only few will pay for. Factual(real)

information cannot easily be restricted todirect purchasers. Many

people benefit who do not pay for it because the market cannot find

the way to charge them. As you can see, providers of political

information try to get as much profit as possible spreading it, so

they HAVE TO supply «too little»info. Otherwise — the market FAILS!

Here is another reason. Some analystsconsider that the market also

fails because of low demand. Even ifsuppliers could «earn all their

money", they wouldn't provide the socially optimalamount of info!

Private demand for political info willnever be the same as social

demand. And it will never reflect its fullsocial 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 generoussibsidies — 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 theirefforts 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 theinternalizing process. In

— 4 -

effect, the sale of advertising at a price that varies according to

the number of recipients permits information producers to

appropriate the benefits of providinga product that many people

value but few would pay for directly. Advertising has an effect of

transforming information from a public intoa private good. It makes

possible for information providers to makeprofits by satisfying the

tastes of large audiences for whosedesire to consume information

they are unable to charge directly.

Thus, customer of goods or services andcitizen 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 voteintelligently 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 thepress broad freedom from

legal liability for the harms it causesmust give away! It does not

necessarily mean that the economic case forlegal sanctions has been

made. Although it seems the market could be relied upon tosupply

«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 thebenefits 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 intwo quite different cases:

— 5 -

1) The first occasion has to do with themarket's responsiveness to

the demands of consumers. The failureoccurs when customers are

unable to detect defects before purchaseor to protect themselves

by taking appropriate precautions after purchase, when they are

unable to translate theirwillingness to pay for nondefective

products into a demand that some producers will satisfy and

profit from. It also occurs whensuppliers are unable to gain any

competitive ad- vantage either by exposing defects in their

rivals' products or by touting therelative merits of their own.

2) The second kind of market failure is aninability to internalize

harm to bystanders — third parties who have no dealings with the

producers but who just happen to be inthe wrong place at the

wrong time when a productmalfunctions. 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, relevanceand

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 ofany particular account of

political events. In addition, since political information usually

comes bundled with other entertainment and news features that

sustain their loyality to particularsuppliers, consumers are not

inclined to punish information producers by avoiding future

patronage even when they commit anoccasional gross error.

Nevertheless, competition among journalists and publishers of

political information tends to create an environment that is in

general more conductive to accuracy than to lies or half-truths.

Journalistic careers can be made by exposing others' errors, and

they can be ruined when a journalist is revealed tobe careless

— 6 -

about truth. These realities create incentives forjournalists not

to make mistakes.

Moreover, the investment that mainstreampublishers and broadcas-

ters make in their reputations forthoroughness and accuracy attests

to the market's perceived ability to detect and reward suppliers of

consistently high- qualityinformation. Information suppliers that

cater to more specialized tastes play a significant role. These

alternative ways of getting info are oftenprobe apparent realities

more deeply, interprete events with greater sophistication and

analyse data more thoroughly than themainstream media are inclined

to do.

In doing so, of course, their principal motivation is to satisfy

their own customers. But while pursuing this goal, they constrain

(even if they do not completely eliminate) the mainstreammedia's

ability to portray falsehood as truthor to OMIT key facts from

otherwise apparently compelete pictures.

The array of incentives with respect to at least the general

quality of political information, with which the market confronts

information providers creates systematic tendencies for them to

provide political info that is accurate andcomplete. Or perhaps it

would be slightly more precise to say that the market unfortunately

does not appear systematically to rewardproducers of falsehood or

half-truth information yet, according to their activities. So that

consumers of political informationdon't need the club of legal

liability to force information providers to provide them with

quality information.

The analysts ought not to be read as anasserting that the reason

the market for political information works well is that it provides

just the right kind and quality ofinformation to each individual

citizen and that each individual citizenhas identical preferences

for info about government. Indeed, the premise of this argument is

that the market works because citizens (or customers) do nothave

identical preferences and producersexploit that fact by finding

— 7 -

ways to cater to and profit from the varying demands of adiverse

citizenry. An implicit assumption provides the normative

underpinnings for the analysis. Obviously, the full implications of

this assumption cannot be worked out here.

The claim that the market in general «works» shouldn't be

understood as a claim that the informationit generates is uniformly

edifying and never distorted. As you knowmany information producers

pander to the public's appetite for scandal and still others see to

it. These facts do not warrant the conclusion that the market

doesn't work.

More significantly, it seems inconceivable that any system of

government regulation — including a system in which information

producers are liable for «defective» information — could in fact

systematically generate a flow of political information that

consistently provided more citizens with the qualityand quantity

thatmet their own needs as they themselves defined than does the

competition in the marketplace of ideasthat we presently enjoy.

This analysis suggests that the workings of the market create

situation in which consumers of politicalinformation do not need

the threat of producer liability to guarantee that they are

systematically getting a TRUSTWORTHYproduct.

But consumers are not the only potential victims of defective

information and market incentives are notalways adequate to protect

NONCONSUMER victims from the harm ofdefective information. Innocent

bystanders, such as pedestrians hit bydefective motorcycles, are

sometimes hurt by products over whoseproducers they have no control

either as consumers or competitors.Persons, who find themselves the

unwitting subjects of defectiveinformation, stand in an analogous

position.

For example, a story about sexual assault might be very

interesting for public and might serve wellthe public interest in

being informed about the police efforts or criminal justice system.

— 8 -

But the victim's name is NOT NECESSARY to its purpose and its

publication both invades her privacy andbroke her safety. In cases

like this, it's not so easy to haveconfidence in market incentives.

The harm from the defect is highly concentrated on the single

defamed or exposed individual.

Now, it's time to ask the majorquestion: Should the press be

permitted to externalize particularizedharms? Why should not the

press, like other business entities, beliable when defects in its

products cause particularized harm to individual third parties who

have few means of self-protection at theirdisposal?

According to the Constitution, defamed public officials or rape

victims should have access to massmedia for rebuttal. As for

everyday practice, the press is not always eager to give space to

claims that it has erred. There are twoobjections, why the press

shouldn't be responsible for the harm ofsuch kind: accountability

to a more demanding legal standard would compromise itsfinancial

viability and undermine its independence.

These objections are too SELF-SERVING to be taken completely

seriously: The financial viability argument is no more persuasive

when the product of the press harmsinnocent third parties than it

is when other manufacturers' malfunctioning products harm

bystanders. As press doesn't underproduce information, thus

«freedom» from liability can't bedefended as necessary subsidy. The

«financial viability»objection points toward the imposition of

liability for harm.

The need to maintain the press's independence from government

does provide support for the press's objection that liability

threatens them unduly. But it's hard to sustain the claim that

government's censorious hand would lurkbehind a rule that required

the press to compensete individuals. It is not obvious that

enforcing a rule that simply prohibitedpublishing the names of rape

victims would signal the beginning of theend of our cherished press

freedom.

— 9 -

Asking whether the press should be morelegally accountable than

it is now for publishing defamatory falsehoods about individuals or

revealing rape victims' names touches anumber of difficult, highly

discussed questions. In spite of the fact,by recasting a portion of

the debate over legal accountability andby focusing attention on

the disparity of legal treatment between producers in the

information market and those in other markets for goods and

services, it does seem possible to gain some fresh andpossibly

useful insight.

The reality seems to be that, with respect to the quality and

quantity of political information, free competition in the

marketplace of ideas performs admirably, with inventive ways of

overcoming market failure and with flexibility in adapting to a

countless consumers preferences.

In light of this reality it ought not tobe amiss to suggest that

when neither the threat of increasing asupposed undersupply nor the

looming shadow of government censorship isimplicated, the massmedia

should be liable for egregious errors.

еще рефераты

Еще работы по иностранным языкам

Реферат по иностранным языкам

Socionical approach in studding of nations

29 Августа 2013

Реферат по иностранным языкам

The Archangel Cathedral

29 Августа 2013

Реферат по иностранным языкам

The capturing

29 Августа 2013

Реферат по иностранным языкам

The cinema in Russia today

29 Августа 2013