SHOULD PRESS BE LIABLE OR NOT?
    Recent years have increased legal accountability of producers and
    advertisers for providing SAFE products and RELIABLE information to
    customers. A government influences a wide range of market
    operations from licensing requirements to contract actions. That
    control announces and enforces determined norms of quality.
    Each of these regulations is designed to protect consumers from
    being hurt or CHEATED by defects in the goods and services they buy.
    This matter, when producers look to the law rather than to the
    market to establish and maintain new standards of quality (of their
    goods), shows, that modern market has an ability of selfregulation.
    But it also shows another unbelievable feature: consumers are both
    incapable of rationally assessing risks and unaware of their own
    ignorance.
    Companies and corporations all over the world are systematically
    inclined to SHIRK on quality and that without the threat of legal
    liability may subject their customers or other people to serious risk
    of harm from their products if it could save money by doing so.
    According to this point of view, for most goods and services,
    consumers are POWERLESS to get producers to satisfy their demand for
    safe, high-quality products! The unregulated market lets unfair
    producers to pass on others the costs of their mistakes.
    Legal liability is ready to correct these "market failures" by
    creating a special mechanism (feedback), regulating relations
    between producers and customers. Unfair producers should be punished
    and their exposure is increasing.
    One market,however, has completely ESCAPED the imposition of legal
    liability. The market for political information remains genuinely
    ee of legally imposed quality obligations. The electronic mass
    media are subject to more extensive government 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 legal obligation to warrant its
    truthfulness, to guarantee its relevance, to assure its
    completeness.
    The thing is: Should the political information 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 the privacy of an
    individual or destroy without justification an individual's
    reputation - again, the cost will not be borne by producer of it.
    This side of "activity" of producers of harmful or defective
    information (goods, services, etc) practically is not acknowledged.
    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 standards of liability is seen as
    PROCOMSUMER. Proposing holding the press to any standard of
    liability for political information is seen as ANTIDEMOCRATIC. The
    press is constitutionally obligated to check on the government.
    Most of policymakers justify legal liability for harms, caused by
    goods and services and quite limited liability for harms, caused by
    information. Liability for defective consumer 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 true preferences.
    Lack of liability for defective or harmful political information
    can be predicated only on a different kind of supposed market failure
    - not a failure of the market to SUPPLY the LEVEL of safety that
    customers want but its failure to supply 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 information is a public good and it has
    many characteristics of a public good. ............