Eek Hayek Alert Nyt Readers - Road to the Middle Class

FOR YEARS THE New York Times has carefully sheltered its readers from the corrosive ideas of Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek (oh all right, there have been four mentions so far this year, one by David Brooks and the rest in Danger on the Right articles about conservatives). But in today’s Book Review Richard A. Posner dares to introduce the name that dare not speak its name. At least not to liberals who thought that Hayek had been buried 50 years ago in Hermann Finer’s The Road to Reaction.

And the worst of it is that Posner hauls Hayek into an article about the current media wars in an utterly unforgivable way. He uses Hayek to show that the bloggers are more accurate than the mainstream media.

The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances is obtuse. The blogosphere has more checks and balances than the conventional media; only they are different. The model is Friedrich Hayek’s classic analysis of how the economic market pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants.

No! Shut him up immediately. This is wrong! It cannot be true that a million bloggers are more accurate than a cadre of highly educated and highly trained journalistic professionals. It just cannot.

Seriously though. Posner’s article is a first-rate analysis of the market position of the MSM in this time of turbulent media change. It is the kind of searching and challenging analysis that the readers of The New York Times rarely experience. There’s a reason for that, Posner explains. People do not read newspapers to encounter uncomfortable facts or to see “their beliefs challenged on issues that are bound up with their economic welfare, physical safety or religious and moral views.” Instead

they want to be confirmed in their beliefs by seeing them echoed and elaborated by more articulate, authoritative and prestigious voices. So they accept, and many relish, a partisan press.

And so The New York Times does not advertise the ideas of a thinker like Hayek who challenges the ideas and the economic well-being of its readers. It takes a prestigious writer like Judge Posner to do that. Sometimes, you see, even the enlightened need to be “challenged.”

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.