Applying Game Theory to Media Failures

by: Daniel De Groot

Mon Aug 06, 2007 at 10:39


I'm finding the meta-analysis of media failures in the netroots to be lacking in something.  We do an excellent job of focusing on the particularly delinquent and malfeasant prominent media repeat offenders like Broder, Brooks, Dowd or Fox News.  We have excellent media critics like Digby, Glenn Greenwald and of course Media Matters who are able to incisively tear apart flawed journalism and note the broader storylines the media are adhering to without evidence.  But we're not thinking enough at the systemic level of how the media is organized, and how that system itself is contributing to the negative results we see.  After all, if we replace the current occupants of Versailles on the Potomac, how will we prevent their replacements from being just as bad eventually?  Joe Klein must have been a sincere and well meaning liberal at some point.

Here I will attempt to apply game theory to the media, in hopes of finding a better understanding for how it all went so wrong, and continues to do so.
Daniel De Groot :: Applying Game Theory to Media Failures
First, let's refresh on game theory a tad for anyone unfamiliar.  Game theory attempts to model decisions made by independent actors which have consequences for all parties, and where choosing to cooperate or not will affect the results.  It is frequently used to explain economic phenomena.  The most famous one is called the Prisoner's Dilemma.

The Prisoner's Dilemma (PD)
Feel free to skip this section if you know the PD and Game theory reasonably well

Picture two burglars, who have robbed a house together and have now been caught by the police.  On them at the time of arrest, each had tools for picking locks.  The penalty for conviction of carrying lock-picking tools 1 year in prison.  The police know the two robbed the house, but cannot prove it.  The penalty for  robbing the house is 5 years in jail.

The police interrogate the two seperately, and each is told:  "We have you on lock-picking, but if you confess to the robbery and will testify against your partner in court, we will drop the lock-pick charge"

Here is the dilemma:  The two have no way to communicate.  Each one can get away free if he betrays the other, but only if the other does not confess.  If both men confess, then the police will get them both on robbery, and each will get 5 years in jail.  If neither confesses, both men will get 1 year for the lock pick charge.  If one confesses and the other does not, the one who does not confess will get nailed for both robbery and lock-pick tools and will get 6 years.  So the essential problem is one of trust.  The most desirable result for each individual is to go free by confessing and having his partner not confess.  After that, it would be better if neither confessed since both will only get 1 year.  However, for each individual to choose that result, he risks that his partner will rat him out, and he'll end up with 6 years instead of just 1 or 5 (by also ratting out his partner).

Since each prisoner can only control his own choices, and knows nothing of his partner's choice, his rational choice is to confess, and the end result is that both get longer jail sentences than if they had taken the risk of cooperating.  Social scientists have conducted experiments on this with human subjects, and the results bear this out.  People will generally avoid the risks of cooperating when the consequences of betrayal are severe.

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Applying the PD to Media Failures

Now let's picture two reporters in the White House.  Each wants to get picked to ask questions during White House briefings.  Overall, both know it is better to ask tough questions since this is what makes the best story.  However, over time, both notice that the Administration figure at the podium tends to only ask questions of the journalist who asks easier questions.  Now, each can cooperate with the other and still ask tough questions.  Thus, the administration will tend to evenly distribute the questions between both.  But if one chooses to ask easier questions, that one will get better treatment.  But if both ask really easy questions, they will get treated equally by the administration, but neither will get to ask any hard questions.

Now, unless both reporters have a high degree of trust for one another, they will fear betrayal by their peer, and start asking easier questions than the other in order to get preferential treatment, or merely to keep up with the other in not being ignored by the Administration.  It becomes a race to the bottom where neither really benefits, but neither can stop playing since the individual results will be even worse.

Of course, there are more than two reporters in the White House press pool.  However, the PD still applies if you think of two prisoners as any one reporter and the other prisoner being the rest of the pool collectively.  For any individual, he can choose to ask easy questions and get preferential treatment from the Administration, or he can ask tough questions and if the rest of the pool doesn't follow suit, get excluded.

Without something to keep the pool in line, the individual incentives will pull them down.  In the past, there were norms of journalist ethics and civic duty which kept reporters in line.  But each transgression by a reporter erodes that norm.  Each time the pool witnesses one of them get singled out for special treatment, means each reporter feels that incentive more strongly come the next briefing.

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A Real World Example:  Canada's Press Gallery and PM Harper

In Canada, the traditional mode of interaction between political leaders and the press was in the form of what we call a "scrum", which is where a group of reporters informally gather around a prominent politician on Parliament Hill and shout questions.  It actually works pretty well.  In 2006, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper's administration announced an end to scrums, instead insisting that reporters submit their names to an aide who would pick reporters to ask questions.

The press gallery reporters revolted and refused to comply.  Harper held fast, and eventually one major media group, CanWest, relented and was rewarded with exclusive interviews on the Canada/US softwood lumber deal.

NYU's journalism school has more on this.

Here's the Canadian Example as a chart, in the Prisoner's Dilemma model:

So for awhile, the gallery held together, until Harper upped the incentives for betrayal by offering exlcusives on a major Canadian issue.  At which point the first few bolted, and eventually the consensus crumbled and the PM had won.

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Anonymous Sourcing, another Application

So far I think it is clear how prisoner's dilemmas, and game theory in general provides some explanation for how the media have failed us so repetively despite all the best efforts of the progressive movement to push them back to objectivity and empiricism. 

Let's look at the subject of the perniscious abuse of anonymous sourcing by journalists of government sources.  Glenn Greenwald has been excellent in noting the all too frequent use of this tactic, particularly where the source in question is revealing nothing but information the government wants propagated.  So why are they granted anonymity then?  Shouldn't that be reserved for those who are risking their jobs to leak information of public concern over the wishes of their superiors?  Instead, we have Karl Rove spreading lies about Iraq or "electoral math" or judicial nominees all to the benefit of his boss and Republicans. 

So let's go back to our two White House reporters.  The first is sitting at his desk when up walks Karl Rove, who offers him a story so long as he is not named in the article.  The first reporter is an honest journalist, and tells Rove he can only grant anonymity if the information would jeapordize Rove's career and is of great public concern.  Rove walks away and goes to the second reporter with the same offer.  This reporter is junior, and eager for a scoop, and agrees.  The information is merely government spin, but is new info, not yet published elsewhere.  It appears in the next day's newspaper attributed to a "Bush Administration official."

So what has happened?  The first reporter has suffered for obeying journalistic ethics while the second has been rewarded for betraying them.

What if both reporters had refused?  Then Rove would be forced to choose between having the story sourced to him by name, or not having the story printed at all.  Further, if over time the second reporter always agrees, and the first one always refuses, his job will be at risk since he is continually being scooped and never has original information to report.  However, if he starts agreeing to Rove's requests, he will only get half the scoops and is betraying his journalistic ethics merely to keep his job.

Of course, if it really were only two reporters it would be easy for them to agree to refuse Rove's requests for anonymity.  But it is many more than that, and many of them are explicitly on board with the administration ideologically.  Thus, no such agreement based only on voluntary compliance and mutual trust is really practical.

Hence, the incentive to allow administration figures to spread disinformation protected by anonymity as granted by our major media organs.  Each reporter can either play the game, or suffer in obscurity.

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Towards a solution

Solving this problem is a big topic, one more suited to its own entry, so here I will just essay that some form of obligatory or regulatory compulsion is needed to overcome these collective action problems.  The old norms that may have kept more reporters behaving like Helen Thomas have failed.  While she of course can still ask probing questions and keep her job, other reporters lacking legendary status know they are much easier to ignore and brush aside.  Some means for reporters to suffer some kind of sanction for violating the ethics of journalism is needed to counteract the games.  The specifics of this would be contentious, but in general, a systemic solution is required for a systemic problem, which is how we must view these media failures.

Worse, the new norms of not asking tough questions and being too complicit in granting anonymity where it is not justified are actually compounding the problem.  Whereas, in a White House press pool where half the reporters ask hard questions, and the other half are sycophants, the reporter who asks tough questions merely misses out on special favours from the Administration.  He does not risk being ostracized by the Administration or even his fellow reporters.  Now, any reporter pushing too hard risks the disfavour of both his (jealous) peers, and payback from the Administration in the form of neve being picked to ask a question in a press conference.  Even Thomas' legendary status did not save her this fate.

In the comments, I welcome proposals towards solving this systemic problem that go beyond the current methods of pushback practiced by Media Matters and other excellent netroots media critics. 


Cross posted at DailyKos

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Applying Game Theory to Media Failures | 6 comments
maybe it's obvious... (4.00 / 2)
but I never see people analyzing it explicitly on these terms.

The nature of the problem usually dictates the nature of the solution.

This is an interesting analysis. (4.00 / 2)
I think the problem is in the incentive system, as you say. Ideally, I would like to see social norms that reward reporters for asking tough questions rather than easy questions.

Since the incentives coming from the administration will fall on the side of easy questions, the newspapers need to combat that with incentives that fall on the side of tough questions. Maybe someone who knows more than me about newspapers can jump in with some ideas about what those incentives might be - promotions and bonuses obviously, but anything else? Or disincentives for sycophants?

This Is A Nice Liberal Analysis. Now For The Radical Critique (4.00 / 3)
[Note: Unlike some radicals, I am not anti-liberal.  I think that a liberal analysis is fine as far as it goes.  So this really is intended as a critique, not a bashing.]

At first blush, you are assuming that a basically fair and effective media system would exist if it were not for the exploitation of PD tradeoffs undermining journalism ethics.

Journalism Ethics Is The Problem, Not The Solution

I believe this is fundamentally mistaken on two counts.  First, in his book Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics And The Public Interest, Jeremy Iggers argues that journalism ethics itself is the problem, and that this can be seen most distinctly in what and how it defines ethical transgressions, paired with what it ignores.  Iggers himself is a working journalist who went back to school to get a PhD in philosophy before writing this book--evidently derived from his thesis.

Although he wrote it in the 1990s, Iggers makes his point by contrasting figures from the early 1980s--Janet Cooke and Kurt Lohbeck--who are analogous to Jason Blair and Judith Miller, except that Lohbeck, who pimped for the Mujahadeen and the CIAs war in Afghanistan, was only a CBS stringer whos work was never publicly disowned.

Miller, of course, would seem to upset Iggers' thesis, since she did suffer consequences, and she was held out as a bad example.  But Miller is the exception who proves the rule.  No one else has paid any noticeable price for doing much the same thing as she did, only a little less blatantly, a little less prominently, a little less successfully.  Her journalistic failure has not become a prototypical template for judging reporting leading up to the Iraq War--to the contrary, it has been used to excuse everyone else.

PD: A Limited Prototype

My problem with PD analysis is a second cousin to this, which takes me to my deeper point, the second count on which the PD analysis falls short.  As a prototype, PD analysis  can explain a good deal, but it can only take us so far.  It can only get us to competetive reporters asking tough questions within the framework of shared assumptions.  That's it.

This situation is certainly superior to what we have today.  But consider: when the press corps was all white and all male, how often did tough, competetive reports ask questions of politicians that questioned the racial and gender orders of the day?

My purpose here is not to disparage this analysis.  I'm a PD fan from way back.  What I want to do, however, is to discourage you from thinking that this analysis by itself is complete, and--more importantly--that it can lead to remedies that are themselves complete.

At the beginning, I said:

At first blush, you are assuming that a basically fair and effective media system would exist if it were not for the exploitation of PD tradeoffs undermining journalism ethics.

I realize that you may not actually believe this yourself.  But your analysis still leads toward seeing the PD tradeoffs as representing something of a prototype for how to fix the media.  (Mathematically models in general tend to have that effect, even when their proponents don't intend them to.)

Dewey's Prototype vs. Lippmann's

I believe a more fruitful prototype--one that can provide a broader context for the PD tradeoff prototype--is that which Iggers himself eventually comes to, which is the bottom-up, question-generated journalistic model that John Dewey advocated against Walter Lippmann in their famous 1920s debate about the function and purpose of journalism.  Iggers is measured in his endorsement. Dewey never really fleshed out how his model would actually function. But Iggers argued that Dewey's ideas have value in providing direction for how the practice of public journalism--a hot topic in the 1990s--could become something more significant than mere journalistic fad.

Public journalism has faded somewhat as a topic.  But in its place we have blogging and YouTube.  Indeed, the model Dewey argued for is much closer to the blogosphere than it is anything we call "journalism" today.

This doesn't mean I'm saying that blogging will save us, and we don't need journalism anymore.  But I am saying that the question-driven, engaged, interested and passionate approach of the blogosphere--so much closer to the spirit of the 18th Century press than the M$M of today--provides an alternative prototype for what successful journalism should be, one that still needs refinements, added skill sets and much more to reach its full potential, but that is, nonetheless, already basically sound in its broad outlines.

The Pragmatist/Cybernetic Prototype

One final point: beneath the level of the Lippmann-Dewey debate about the nature of journalism lies the positivist/pragmatist debate about the nature of science, specifically, and about human knowledge and meaning more generally.  The Lippmann/positivist side of the debate privileges science, facts, objective truth, and expert opinion, whereas the Dewey/pragmatist side of the debate values science as a disciplined extension of common sense, not fundamentally superior to any other disciplined extension of common sense.  The Lippmann/positivist side is centered on the expert products it produces, the Dewey/pragmatist side is focused on the human subjects, the human agents who are the creators of knowledge in the first place.

While positivism had a powerful attraction in breaking with the dogmas of the past, pragmatism realized that positivism itself had its own set of dogmas, creating its own critical hierarchy in opposition to the older hierarchies it opposed.

In contrast, pragmatism does not hold itself aloof.  It is not a philosophical stance immune to its own crticism.  Quite the opposite, it is a cybernetic philosophy, informed by whatever criticial perspectives and projects it can deploy in the world at large.

This is the great divide, in my mind--that between foundational philosophies, which have some unquestionable bottom, and cybernetic philosophies, which have no bottom, but only a center, that place where the most intense feedback loops inevitably circle back to.

That's the prototype I find best.  At least so far.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

great critique Paul (4.00 / 2)
You know I'm a fan of your commentary, particularly at Greenwald's place.

I would suggest, with no snark intented, this could have been a diary in itself, only because it deserves a wider audience than it will likely get as a "mere" comment to my obscure diary. 

I wholly agree that my analysis, even if 100% correct, and if the problems I outline were solved perfectly would not lead to what we could call an ideal (or likely even a "good enough") state of journalism (my criteria for "good enough" journalism is that it effectively supplements government oversight and fosters an informed populace).

Sadly there are many things going wrong, and I am trying to just break off one piece and isolate what is going bad with it.

The dailykos crosspost garnered a great deal more commenters than here (as one might expect, no offence to openleft!) - including some interesting critiques from others much more versed in game theory than I, plus a couple self-identified ex-journalists.  It's worth reading actually. 

I hope you are right and that the blogosphere represents the vanguard of a new media model that supplants the current system in the near future (We can't wait much longer with this broken media)  I had only treated it as a fact-checking and critique-generating engine which can sometimes shame the MSM into behaving better.  My sense is that this hasn't been as effective as we like because of the systemic flaws pulling the media back into bad behaviour.  Plus, fear of being embarrassed by us doesn't motivate a number of media actors who don't give a shit what we think.  It only works on the ones who are already inclined towards our goals.

As far as radicalism versus liberalism, I am increasingly coming to believe something radical is required.  That incremental progress will only be torn down by the malignant forces who have worked so long to turn the media into the engine of useless drivel it has become. 

[ Parent ]
Thanks (0.00 / 0)
It's hard to strike the right tone, because I really do think the PD analysis is very helpful as far as it goes.  But, as a former math major myself, I know just how seductive elegant math can be.  Just look at neo-classical economics!

I definitely will check out the DKos discussion.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Thank you for expressing what we all knew intuitively (4.00 / 1)
Thank you!  This is something that needed to be said.  This post is a solid explanation of something I, and probably others, have intuitively felt for a long time.  I always got the feeling that this is what happened to the Media, but I lacked the knowledge to know how to coherently express it.  I'll try to credit you when I'm blatantly ripping your off analysis and repeating to others. ;)
Applying Game Theory to Media Failures | 6 comments
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