The Supply Side: What Affects the Supply of Information Provided by the Media

Abstract

This chapter investigates the political economy of media: the factors by which information is included or excluded from the supply offered us by the news media. Regardless of whether we are perfectly rational or systematically biased, what determines the supply of information can affect the understandings we end up with. Beginning with a short history of the media and how it developed, this chapter concludes that while the media ideally should provide a free “marketplace of ideas” or an open public sphere, several political-economic forces frustrate that ideal. These include ownership concentration, ideological bias, commercial and political pressures, and cultural and institutional influences. In combination, these supply-side biases produce a media system that not only fails to counteract our evolved psychological biases but compounds them.