The Information Economy

What Bernie Sanders’s Plan to Save American Journalism Gets Right – and What It Misses

Independent and effective news reporting is at the heart of the democratic process. The dangers to media plurality and local journalism that Sanders identifies...

We Need to Deal With WhatsApp's Misinformation Problem

A peculiar feature of WhatsApp groups has made the spread of misinformation much easier. We need better design guidelines for platforms like WhatsApp, ones...

How the Adtech Market Incentivizes Profit-Driven Disinformation

If we want to solve the disinformation crisis, we need to fix the perverse incentives created by the online advertising market through structural and...

The Decline of American Journalism Is an Antitrust Problem

Weak antitrust enforcement set the stage for Facebook and Google to extract the fruits of publishers’ labor. We won’t be able to save journalism...

How to Protect the News Media in the Age of Digital Platforms

Digital platforms present a new formidable threat to the news media that market forces will not correct if left to their own devices. The...

How the Legal System Helps the Media Hold the Powerful to Account

The legal system is the bloodline of investigative journalism. Recent maneuvers by the Trump administration may jeopardize it.     When done effectively, investigative journalism can greatly...

Watch: Raghuram Rajan on How Markets and States Leave Communities Behind

In a recent Stigler Center conversation with Luigi Zingales, Rajan talked about his new book The Third Pillar and explained why today’s populists “are...

“Emmanuel Macron Is Not a Liberal, He Just Pretends to Be”

The French president found himself under fire following an attempted police raid on the offices of the investigative news site Mediapart. While many around...

Social Media Clickwraps and the “Manufacture of Consent”

A new study identifies a political economic interface design strategy that threatens privacy protections by maintaining “the biggest lie on the internet.” We check the...

The News Media’s Business Model of Extortion

The Jeff Bezos vs. The National Enquirer scandal highlights the role that extortion may play in the business model of some news outlets.  Jeff Bezos’s...

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