More and more, it seems, we in the progressive movement are bumping heads against what appear to be more-or-less insane corporate policies which are not only harmful to society at large, not only unprofitable, but more or less the conventional wisdom within an entire industry. There are a couple of examples that come to mind immediately: the consensus opinion among cable news channels that talk shows should be predominantly conservative or right-center, and the consensus opinion in big business that unionization is bad and should be thwarted, even using illegal means.
These are just a couple of examples, but even these two have devestating consequences for the progressive movement and the country as a whole. The conservative domination of cable news is part of the reason we're bogged down in Iraq, and it's a very powerful echo chamber that tends to silence the progressive voices in our party, and favors Republican and conservative Democratic candidates. Meanwhile, the relentless union-busting ethos in corporate America is wreaking havoc on the economy, because it sharply exaggerates economic inequality; at the same time, it deflates the idea of solidarity in the workplace, which is one of the pillars of the progressive movement.
I became very curious about these phenomena when I read Jeff Cohen's book, Cable News Confidential. The book provides incredible detail on the atmosphere at MSNBC in the months leading up to the war in Iraq, and some of the reasoning behind the managerial decisions which led to the failure of Donohue on MSNBC, and the increasingly shrill pro-war views expressed on all three cable news channels. What's interesting is that, from Cohen's vantage point, these decisions were remarkably boneheaded, and appeared to defy simple business reasoning. MSNBC was not trying to find a way to attract more viewers than Fox News Channel, it was simply trying to imitate Fox. MSNBC did not shrewdly ascertain that Fox's success was based on its cultivation of a niche audience, and that the secret to success in cable news was finding a different niche and attracting that niche in novel ways; instead, it obtusely assumed that cable news consumers were emphaticaly right-leaning, and so it attempted to mimic Fox rather than provide an alternative. CNN, which should have naturally been the beneficiary of MSNBC's bumbling inability to compete with Fox, instead appears to have done much the same.
In addition to being a terrible story of journalism gone horribly wrong, this is a fascinating case study of an entire industry failing, and failing badly. Our textbook understanding of capitalism would suggest that large companies should be constantly doing battle with one another, looking for opportunities that their competition has not found, and exploiting those opportunities for profit. In the case of cable news, we'd expect at least one of the channels to recognize that no one was adequately serving the needs of progressive cable news consumers, and to attempt to exploit that opportunity before the competition did the same. Not only did cable news executives not notice this opportunity in the rabidly pro-war days of early 2003, they still haven't learned the lesson, despite ample evidence that there's a large audience of progressives hungry for round-the-clock news and opinion, and despite ample evidence that the few cable news shows which do cater to a progressive audience (Countdown, Daily Show, Colbert Report) do remarkably well. So why aren't the cable news executives rushing to exploit this opportunity, and gain ratings and ad dollars while the competition sits on its hands?
I think part of the answer lies in the concept of "information cascades", described in The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. In chapter 3 of the book, Surowiecki explores the concept of herding, which is a case of a large group of people imitating each other, on the assumption that some of the people in the group have a good reason for their behavior. In many cases, this can be natural and beneficial behavior - Surowiecki cites the example of looking out the window to determine whether people on the street are carrying umbrellas, in order to determine whether it's likely to rain. In other cases, however, this kind of behavior can be anti-competitive - Surowiecki explores data which shows that NFL coaches are overly cautious in football games. The book also considers the case of the plank road industry, which appeared to be a profitable way to improve transportation between small towns in the early 19th century, and in fact proved to be a colossal investment disaster.
So what is behind such anti-competitive behavior? There are a many competing theories. Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point suggests that there are certain individuals who have unique skills which are instrumental in creating an "epidemic", which can range from a medical epidemic, to a crime epidemic, to an epidemic of stupid business decisions. Surowiecki explores the research of economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch, which suggests that in cases where individual decisions are made with knowledge of prior decisions made by others, and where those decisions appear to have beneficial outcomes, an "information cascade" can form, allowing a large group of people to erroneously decide that the first early decisions were th right ones to make. Welch, in fact, maintains a bibliography and resource reference on information cascades.
It's important to understand the anotomy of the right-leaning mindset in cable news, and the anti-union mindset in big business, in order to conquer and reverse these mindsets. If there is, indeed, an information cascade among cable news executives which favors promoting conservative commentators, how do we stop that cascade? Is the solution to boycott the news channels, regulate or sue the channels into providing balanced opinions, put public pressure on the executives through letter-writing campaigns? Is it possible to create the competition we want to see - i.e., to start a new cable news channel which would consistently provide progerssive opinion and news, and thereby to capture audience share and advertising dollars from the current cable news channels? Or is there some way to stop or reverse the information cascade, to flood the channels of communication that inform cable news executives, and thereby to convince them that conservative opinion per se is not the way to gain ratings on cable news, but niche-oriented programming is?
All of these questions could be applied to the union-busting industry, the gas-guzzling-cars industry, the anti-music-sharing industry, and any number of other industries in which corporate policy seems to herd around an anti-competitive and unprofitable consensus. In this post, I've merely explored the question as it relates to the conservative-cable-news industry for the sake of example. But I'd love to hear from you, particularly if you have some expertise on information cascades and similar fields of study - what do you think? What is the smartest strategy for putting an end to anti-competitive conservative corporate behavior?
For those readers who are not experts in the field - would you be interested in a little bit of homework? I'd like to see what we could accomplish by scouring the information cascade resources that Ivo Welch putting together, and seeing whether any of that material contains interesting ideas for understanding, and perhaps reversing, the information cascade in conservative cable news channels. Let me know if that sounds interesting, and I'll try and organize it.
