Markets in Everything: Covering the Predictable Edition
How do you cover a shoo-in?
Alex Tabarrok observes that InTrade is predicting a 98.5 percent chance of Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation and wonders “What tells you more about the Sotomayor nomination, all of the chatter and debate in the MSM over her “controversial” remarks or the single number from intrade.” Then he quotes Jim Ward:
Do reporters and news Agencies even know to check the betting markets? Or do they just ignore it, because “X sure to happen, nothing to see” is not a story? Or they don’t want to seem biased, and have to provide 2 sides to every story…Why not just throw Intrade odds into every story as an addendum?
Look. What we’re seeing in the press’ coverage of the Sotomayor nomination isn’t the media’s failure to understand the value of markets. What we’re seeing is the genius of the free market in action. Media outlets are in the business of obtaining an audience and selling access to that audience to advertisers. You don’t gain audience share by telling people that the most important political drama of the weak is not, in fact, interesting or dramatic. You gain audience share by hyping it up as a big important battle. So that’s what they’re doing.
If you peer into analysis articles on the issue, they all wind up conceding that Sotomayor’s confirmation is all-but-assured. Nobody is confused about this. The incentives just point toward writing around it.
14 Responses to “Markets in Everything: Covering the Predictable Edition”
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July 14th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Matt,
During the election season you did a couple of good posts about the supposed predictive power of political betting markets. Essentially, prices on those markets reflect the media’s conventional wisdom. They don’t, generally, contain information much more valuable than whatever Juan Williams is currently saying.
In this case there’s some divergence, but I doubt the media are systematically skewing the story to make the proceedings appear much more consequential than they are.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:56 am
ok, right, but where’s the genius in that? isn’t this just more evidence of Josh Marshall’s theory about DC and the elite press corps being heavily biased to favor the conservative POV? and therefore, we get extra coverage about a series of nontroversies that nobody cares about except for extreme conservatives and DC insiders??
July 14th, 2009 at 10:57 am
Tabarrok: “What tells you more about the Sotomayor nomination, all of the chatter and debate in the MSM over her “controversial” remarks or the single number from intrade.”
Tabarrok I’m sure knows this, but I don’t think anyone, not the MSM, not the Senators at her hearing, not any of the newspaper readers or news show watchers except for a few unengaged people who see a story or two in passing, is trying to figure out whether she’ll get confirmed. What the nomination is about, at this point, is entirely theater, and the chatter and debate tells us a lot more about the theater than does a number on InTrade. And the theater itself might actually point toward what we can expect from Repubs on future judicial nominees–how many are going to go balls-to-the-walls over manufactured non-controversy, etc., and toward just how dedicated Repubs are to alienating Latinos and moderate women. What’s Ben Nelson going to do? Are Snowe and Collins going to just sit there and then vote to confirm her, or are they actually going to get fed up with their fellow R’s and come to her defense?
July 14th, 2009 at 11:01 am
Also: the most important political drama of the weak.
You mean, like Les Misérables?
July 14th, 2009 at 11:06 am
I generally take a back seat to no one in hating on the media, but in this case I think there is a point being missed. Political debate needs a framework in which it can play out. Events like SCOTUS nominations are one such framework. Now of course that debate can be of high or of low quality, and sadly the quality is mostly very low. But it is necessarily the case that debate needs to happen, and an already-assured nominee, or a law that is sure to pass (or fail) or whatever are as good an excuse as any to have it.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Correct, David. The sturm and drang the Republicans are putting on is not intended to derail Sotomayor’s nomination. They’re just using the forum her hearings provide to carry on their ongoing fight over politics vs. an administration and Congressional majority they oppose.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:15 am
You don’t gain audience share by telling people that the most important political drama of the weak is not, in fact, interesting or dramatic. You gain audience share by hyping it up as a big important battle. So that’s what they’re doing.
This should be taught in every high school in America as part of a course in media literacy.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:25 am
#4:
Spartacus!
July 14th, 2009 at 11:31 am
@5 David said: “Political debate needs a framework in which it can play out. Events like SCOTUS nominations are one such framework. Now of course that debate can be of high or of low quality, and sadly the quality is mostly very low. But it is necessarily the case that debate needs to happen, ….”
But the framework being presented by the media is a very limited one and, IMO, skewed away from the important issues
E,g. The Ricci case is being described and discussed as a “reverse discrimnation” case.
Nowhere in the media is the fact the the Supreme Court made up a new standard (actually, brought in from another area of law) to apply to the “disparate effects” rule created by Congress under Title V.
So, two things are going undiscussed: that courts do and should make law and this Court is certainly doing so. (Remember, if enough folks object to the Court’s interpretation of Title V, congress can amend that law to “over rule” the Ricci case. (For more on the propriety of judcial activism see my blogs from April
Second, the conservatives are arguing that Sotomayor “got the law wrong.” Actually, she and her fellow panelists got the law right and the Suprme Curt changed the law.
I agree completely with you (and many conservatives) that this confirmation is a good opportunity for the sort of political/policy debate we need. But so far the press is failing to provide the framework to do so.
One sad consequence is that people end up thinking law and judging is simply a matter of “calling balls and strikes” when it serves a much higher purpose of seeking to do justice.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:53 am
I don’t read the media as suggesting there is some substantial chance that Sotomayor won’t get confirmed. Their hyping of the story is more along the lines: “Will the Republicans land a glove on her or won’t they?”
July 14th, 2009 at 11:55 am
Speaking of ginning up controversy for ratings witness Wolf Blitzer and CNN last evening touting LaToya Jackson’s semi-allegations her brother Michael was murdered. LaToya Jackson merits the credence of a major news organization? She has as much relevance as someone living beneath a bridge. Ever catch her psychic phenomena infomercial scams? She’s half a halfwit.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Yglesias:
“What we’re seeing is the genius of the free market in action.”
When I think of the genius of the free market in action I think of Lehman Brothers collapsing last year under the weight of its overleveraged bad bets and the resulting panic and hysteria. Not to mention the bubblicious housing market.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Any reporter who checked the betting markets and put that in a story as if it were something important or worth noticing deserves to be fired.
July 14th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
I want to change my answer a little. It is definitely the case that Senators should be having political debates, and it is definitely the case that the most natural forum for them to have them is within the context of their normal activities as Senators. This means, for example, that it is unavoidable that the debates over a law will include discussions of policy issues somewhat outside the narrow domain of the law that is being debated. Similarly, there is no realistic way to get around the fact that vetting of a SCOTUS nominee is going to be an occasion for discussion of judicial-branch related issues that are only tangentially related to the actual qualifications of the nominee. What’s uncool, however, is to use the nominee as a prop in these battles. So it’s more-or-less OK for Senators to use a SCOTUS nomination is an *occasion* to have a debate about, say, affirmative action. What’s not OK is to twist things to make it seem like this nominee is somehow deeply implicated in the issue you want tao talk about. In other words, its far better to say: “while we’re on the subject of how the courts should handle discrimination cases, here’s what I think…” and far worse to gin up some BS so that you can say: “as the nominee’s decision in such-and-such case proves, her views about this issue must be XYZ, and for that reason I conclude that she is pure evil.”