I'd written:
>What makes Britain, Canada, France, New Zealand, Australia, Japan,
and Singapore 'outliers' and China and Malaysia 'inliers', ferchrissakes?<
And Brad replied:
> That there are a lot more countries like China and Malaysia than like
> the OECD countries with broadcasting monopolies: the BBC gets swamped
> by Turkmenistan TV.
Exactly, Brad! Half a billion well educated and healthy people are reduced to
the status of 'outliers' - by way of selecting a *single* variable, presuming
it to be an *independent* variable, and then presuming it to be a *decisive* variable.
So "[I]t does not appear that adverse consequences of government ownership of
the media are restricted solely to the instances of government monopoly,"
implicitly condemns broadcasting duopolies in *all* institutional and
economic settings. But it gets worse ...
> But one of the most interesting things about the paper (not in the
> abstract) is that it is a high government ownership share of the
> *press*--not broadcasting--that appears to be truly poisonous...
Well, in light of the professed fact that "Government ownership is more
pervasive in broadcasting than in the printed media," the abstract should be
clear about this, don't you think? I mean, are they tarring government
broadcasting with the same brush, or not? The abstract certainly does.
Public broadcasting in rich countries is wrong because people are unhealthy
and uneducated in poor countries where governments control the presses ...
Here in public-broadcasting-inflicted Australia, we're still hung up on the
old idea that you should be clear about what your variables are before you try
to quantify the relationship between them. Hell, some even believe that it's
a good idea to try to fit a little validity into your categories ...
> The tie-in with Sen is that I think of his democracy-famine link and
> this government-owned media result as both being about the beneficial
> effects of what Hirschman calls "voice."
A duopoly will get you more 'voice' than any of the alternatives, mate - and
on a lot less channels, too (and that's true in theory, too - whether you
subscribe to the leftie position of 'control by concentrated ownership',
Chomsky's 'filters' thesis, or Steiner's more mainstream thesis of competitive
programming [ie. strategic emulation] - and it's not as if the three are
particularly incompatible with each other, either - I swallow 'em all, myself).
Cheers,
Rob.
