media maven / By Marcy Burstiner

For What It’s Worth

(June 4, 2009)  Top execs from just about every major U.S. newspaper chain met in Chicago late last month to discuss ways to get you to pay for news you get over the Internet. But you won’t find news of that meeting or what came out of it in any of their newspapers or online sites.

Maybe they don’t want you to know their plans. Or perhaps they no longer employed enough journalists to cover it.

As news execs try to come up with a price people will pay for news, many people insist they won’t pay any price. Why, when they can get the information they think they need from blogs, social networking sites and other places for free?

The question news industry leaders ask is this: Can we place a value on information, and if so how much can we charge? But this might be a narrow way of looking at the situation. Consider that even as you refuse to pay money to get information, businesses and organizations will spend an awful lot of money to keep it from you. So the less you will spend to be informed, the less money they must spend to keep you uninformed. Your frugality saves them money.

This is the value of ignorance.

Stanford University Professor Robert Proctor studies ignorance as a science. He calls it agnotology, which, in a sign of our time, is a word you will find in Wikipedia but not Merriam-Webster. Agnotologists study culturally-induced ignorance. The academic discipline developed out of a desire to understand the publication of false or misleading scientific studies.

Back in 2003, Proctor told the New York Times that he worried about a new trend. Parties to liability lawsuits over tobacco and lead paint were paying historians to testify and these historians lacked ethical rules to guide them. Imagine the power of the historian. By testifying to a particular version of history to a jury, which will not double-check your facts, you can sway a jury verdict. Society is one big jury — too busy and lazy to double-check facts that often come to us from paid experts.

Double-checking facts is the journalists’ job. We leave it to them to give us the reality check we need. An example of this reality check came in April 2008, when New York Times columnist David Barstow reported how the Pentagon and defense contractors paid and directed more than 150 military experts who regularly appeared on television news shows. He described these paid consultants as a “media Trojan horse” that the Bush administration had built to “shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.” Barstow recently won the Pulitzer Prize for that story. Had he been laid off or taken a buyout, we still wouldn’t know about it.

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