The social costs of media feeding frenzies

Abstract

Concern over the cost of excessive media coverage has increased in recent years. This paper offers an explanation of excessive coverage as an application of the tragedy of the commons, resulting from a lack of property rights over a story. News organizations consider only their private costs in covering a story, not the external costs of lower quality of overall coverage and invasion of privacy. However, restricting access to a story can also facilitate censorship. This paper consider means of limiting access which do not compromise journalistic freedom, specifically examining the parallel to tradeable discharge permits in environmental economics.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.