An Austrian Analysis of the Fourth Estate (video)

0:00The Theory of Money and Credit

0:30I'd like to welcome everyone back to the Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture. Discussions of high theory among intellectuals will not by itself win the day. To convert others to the truth, the theory must prove its merit in application. The Austrian School has a long tradition of public intellectuals who have dedicated themselves to Bearing the Fruit of Austrian Thought, men such as Ron Paul in Politics, Benjamin Anderson in Finance, and Henry Hazlitt in Journalism. To commemorate their efforts, we offer the Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture. It's a pleasure for us to have William Anderson deliver this year's Hazlitt Lecture.

1:17Dr. Anderson is Assistant Professor of Economics at Frostburg State University. He earned a B.S. in Journalism from the University of Tennessee, an M.A. in Economics from Clemson University, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Auburn University. He has published scores of articles in scholarly and popular venues, including the Southern Economic Journal, Public Choice, the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The Journal of Political, Social and Economic Studies, the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and the Journal of Libertarian Studies. Dr. Anderson is an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute. He will speak on the topic, An Austrian Analysis of the Fourth Estate. Dr. Anderson.

2:04And as I begin this lecture, I really would like to thank Lew Rockwell first and the Mises Institute for inviting me to speak. After I realized that Lew had taken leave of a census in giving me this invitation, I decided to accept it anyway. And I also would like to thank all of you for attending this session and we will determine in about 40 minutes or so if in fact you had taken leave of your census to be here. But I would like to thank all of you for being here. This is an exciting conference. In fact, you know, I look at this thing, it's not really so much sessions, it's an intellectual feast. I mean, I started looking at sessions, I think, which one do I want to go to? I actually want to go to them. It's not like going to the American Economic Association, wherever you get a book this thick, and you go through it and say, I don't want to go to any of these sessions.

2:52And so this is what I, you know, I really appreciate. I will not be giving anything on PowerPoint. I've actually never done a PowerPoint presentation in my life. I will not be doing anything here on West Virginia PowerPoint, as Richard Vedder calls it. So we'll just have to deal with the spoken word and hope that everything turns out well. I am honored to give this lecture today, and especially honored because it's named after Henry Hazlitt. I think Jeff Tucker aptly named him the People's Austrian. All of us are indebted to Henry Hazlitt. As a journalist, he towered above his peers and as an economist, and I do call him an economist.

3:39He could intellectually overpower the imposters who have dominated mainstream economics for more than a century. To make my point, all we have to do is remember that Henry Hazlitt once wrote on the same editorial page that today embraces the rants of Paul Krugman. Who is a better economist? One was a high school graduate, did not go to college, the other has his doctorate from MIT, and all I have to say is, you know, in areas of clarity, sense, and in economics, I don't even think there's a contest. Mr. Krugman still has yet to learn what opportunity cost is, so he has a long way to go.

4:25As for journalism, remember that Hazlitt wrote for the New York Times. Now, the New York Times, as we know, also gave us the faux journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize fraudulently, a man named Walter Durante. But at least back then, the Times could counter with Henry Hazlitt. Today, the Times gives us Jason Blair, and then counters with Judith Miller. So you can tell that the state of intellectual prowess at the New York Times has gone down in the last few decades. We also owe a huge debt of gratitude to Henry Hazlitt, who along with Leonard Reed helped Ludwig von Mises gain a tiny intellectual toehold upon the U.S. academic world.

5:14You know, academics scorned Mises, but Mr. Hazlitt saw through the chaff thrown about by other academic economists and realized that the rejected Mises still held the keys to the kingdom. and help to make Mises' work secure even as that handiwork has outlived both men. And Henry Hazlitt was an outstanding economist in his own right. We're talking about a man who gave us the book, The Failure of the New Economics. And Mr. Hazlitt was somebody who actually read Keynes' general theory and understood it. I'm not sure Keynes understood it. But he understood, and he wrote a line-by-line reputation. And one time I was teaching a course at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. It was an upper division macro course, and we were using Wallace Peterson's text.

6:00And this was the most popular intermediate macro text. And to give you a sense of what this book is like, it quoted Keynes like scripture. In other words, I'm serious. I mean, he would present an idea and he would have something from the general theory. And that was, in his thinking, that was all he needed to do. That was the only argument needed to be made. Obviously it was right because Keynes said it. Well, what did Hazlitt do? Hazlitt took a line-by-line refutation of that book, and I would use that in that class, basically use Keynes' foil and use Hazlitt's as the main body of work. I wasn't supposed to be doing that, but I did it anyway. And so I would say that Henry Hazlitt was a real giant in journalism.

6:47If you really want to get a sense of his career, I would urge you to read Jeffrey Tucker's piece in the book, 15 Great Austrian Economists, and this is the one entitled, Henry Hazlitt, The People's Austrian. And because of that, because it is available, I'm not going to be going through his long career here. I just want to say that Hazlitt really was a giant in a lot of fields. And this is a man who, if he applied for a newspaper job today with his educational background, he wouldn't even be allowed to sweep the floor. And yet, we look at what he produced versus what all of these people with graduate degrees working in the media, see what they produce, I leave the results up to you to determine.

7:38And so, again, I'm very much honored. Also, partly I'm interested in Hazlitt the Journalist because I was a journalism major in college 30-some years ago. That doesn't mean I learned anything, I will confess to you. I took econ, I was on the track team and we had difficult workouts and econ class was a very, very good time to sleep and so I did not do very well And I remind some of my old professors of that every once in a while, saying that you had a chance to kill me off right there, but oh no, now I'm in the profession. And so, I've always had obviously an interest in the press, having worked for a newspaper and the like.

8:27In fact, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the media and took some different views of the media and have off and on dabbled and done some papers. I've actually done some articles for the Mises Institute on the Mises page and also done some more formal academic papers in the subject. So I do have a lot of interest in it and I do hope that I can convey some of that interest to you One of the things I want to do today, though, is sort of take an Austrian view of the media. Now, when you say an Austrian view, I know it's a really wide-ranging thing. I'm going to be coming at it more from the point of view of the Austrian economists, as you shall see, dealing with Menger, with Mises, some of their theoretical points, and see how this applies to journalism.

9:18Journalism One of the things that you find though with journalism is that the mainstream economists simply haven't written very much about it and I would say one of the reasons is because it doesn't lend itself easily to mathematical modeling and without mathematical modeling I mean where is economics poor thing and so we tend to shy away from it and or the approach Which the economics sometimes becomes like, if you look at, for example, Professor Eaglin and others wrote a book called, Sacred Trust, about the medieval church. And the assumption is that people were only interested in otherworldly things.

10:06It's sort of the good government viewpoint. That all politicians are interested in good government. That's making wise decisions that benefit all of society. and of course never themselves. And so often we see this in journalism. We tend to, if I may use a really crude example, but in that great classic movie Animal House, there is a scene towards the end where somebody steals the baton from the bandleader and marches the band into a brick wall. And the band keeps trying to march through this brick wall and they never succeed. And we often come up with that in the area of government. We continue to come back to the well of good government, good government, we have to have good government, or same thing with journalism. We know that these guys, quote, are biased, we know that they are going to have certain proclivities, and yet somehow in the end we still expect them to produce this non-biased material.

11:07And we're asking somebody to do something I think that they're really not capable of doing. But at the same time, no matter what, and being a refugee of journalism school, I can assure you that the good journalism, good government theme was pounded into us. And nobody quite knew what good government was, but I think it was regulating those monopolies called businesses, protecting consumers, and all the other things that government is supposed to be doing. So, first I want to begin in talking about the modern institution of the press and keep in mind that when I'm speaking of journalists today, I'm speaking as part of the institutionalized press, okay, not the idea of simple freedom of speech.

11:58There are times when people confuse the two of them. To give you an analogy, if people criticize public education, what's thrown back at them? Oh, well, you're against education. You're against people learning how to read and write. And you think, no, I'm against public education. I don't know how to learn to read and write in public schools. Well, when you look at the modern institution of the press, and you say something critical about it, what comes back? Oh, you are against freedom of the press. Well, obviously, you want to censor people. No, that's not the point we're making.

12:48But I want to concentrate on this institution that we call the press and apply some Austrian insights there. Now the first thing I think we have to keep in mind is that the modern press, as we know it, really is a progressive era institution. You really cannot understand the New York Times and these other entities, CBS News or whatever, without understanding the progressive era and the mentality that was produced there. Now, if you really want to learn about the progressive era, I would urge that you read one of Professor Higgs' books, whether it's Crisis and Leviathan, certainly his book Against Leviathan deals a lot with it.

13:40And I think that even though theoretically the progressive era supposedly ended around the time of World War I, in truth the progressive era is with us today, and even though the institutions that came out of the progressive era don't work, they're very much like, again, that proverbial band running into the wall, At the same time, we continue to go back to them, demand that these institutions produce something that they really can't produce. And so, I would like to look at a little bit about that. In 1922, a number of journalistic representatives came up with the so-called canons of journalism.

14:30And in the canons of journalism, the idea was that newspaper reporters, and this was at the time it was really pretty much journalism was dominated by the print media and the idea was that they should be objective, so the front page you should not be able to tell what a person's ideology is, where they're coming from but on the editorial page you could say what you wanted and this was in essence be the institution of journalism and not only that but they wanted to take a quote scientific approach to it And the same way that during this particular time they're taking more scientific approaches to government, to management And I put scientific in quotes, I will let you determine whether or not these things really were scientific But at any rate, this was the way of thinking And this is opposed to the older press, what we would call the party press is something that in many ways is like a lot of today's blogs, you know, you're not going to read the daily costs to see some sort of defense of free enterprise, or the lewrockwell.com to see socialism raised, you know, the banner of socialism raised, these particular, but the party press, you know, once upon a time, you knew where the writer stood, you knew where the points of view

16:04What we also began to see, very much though, with the so-called progressive-era press or the modern candidates of journalism press, was a dominant viewpoint that somehow capitalism in and of itself was bad, or it needed to be curbed. that you had a lot of writers, for example, up in Sinclair that they're talking about this week because of the 100th year anniversary of his book called The Jungle, which not only got it, it also got the conditions in the meat packing plants wrong as well.

16:53I mean people think that somehow Sinclair was describing things that actually were happening when in fact it really wasn't. and Ida Tarbell with her history of the Standard Oil Company and the like that the view was in fact that there was something wrong with capitalism and so you needed scientific institutions to sort of take the edge off what was seen as a system that was very predatory. Also, the press at that time was seeing something akin in its relationship to government, something akin to a regulatory agency. Now we have a little bit of an irony here, a privately owned entity, the press, in essence regulating the workings of government.

17:45It was to be a watchdog of government, that the press, their job was to keep government in check. Well what do we know about regulatory agencies? Well economists over the years have talked about capture theory. What happens with capture theory? Well what we find is that the entities being regulated often would capture the regulatory agencies and in fact that you would see some sort of cooperative action between them I think that everybody in this room understands the real limitations of the, everybody understands the real limitations of regulation, government regulation of business.

18:44Regulation of Business, and I don't even want to go into that in this talk, and I don't want to go down, you know, down that particular rabbit trail, but I think people, I think, instinctively understand. Well, what happened with the press? Well, guess what? Journalism regulating the press, the watchdog of the press, what has happened over the years? Well, is the outstanding journalist and also advocate of free markets, Warren Brooks, or should I say the late Warren Brooks, as he wrote an article in the Quill back in 1991, shortly before he died. And he said that journalists are not so much interested in the status quo as they are interested in the statist quo.

19:37And that his point was that our main beat is government and that therefore, if you think about that, these are where the relationships are formed. Now I can give you a little bit of a personal side to that, very much an understanding. For a few years I was a newspaper reporter, and the prize beats were the government beats. Beats like the political, you know, our top person was the political writer and he covered the state legislature. Also the other top beats would be the county courthouse because that's also where the trials were held.

20:26So you cover county government plus all of the trials going on. The Police Reporter, and he would play cowboy with the police, to put it mildly. He ultimately got a job with the Sheriff's Department. He wrote a lot of articles, let's just say, that were favorable to the candidate running for Sheriff in 1978 and soon afterwards was rewarded for his coverage with a new job with the Hamilton County Sheriff's Department, but also City Hall. Now less so at that time especially was the Federal Courthouse. The Federal Courthouse was a real backwater. And for years, by the way, all over the country Federal Courthouses really were a backwater for journalism until the drug war and until the 1980s when the Reagan administration pushed through a number of acts that allowed the, either criminalized things that weren't criminalized before or allowed certain activities that occurred on the local level to somehow Now, magically be transferred into federal court, and so now with so many cases going to federal court, it no longer is the backwater that it used to be, unfortunately, I say, and those of you who have read my articles on the federal criminal justice system, I think you probably understand that I would not really want to see this particular development, but at any rate, what beat did you not want? You didn't want the business beat. Why didn't you want the business beat?

22:00Businessmen wanted you to write PR stuff for them. You weren't going to go to their board meetings and see the give and take of activities. They didn't want you to see any of that. What they wanted you to see was a favorable view of their operations. and there was no sunshine law for business meetings and for these private organizations and so you didn't want to you didn't want to see any of that and so therefore you know you had the sense of my I guess my job is just the right PR for the business people that's what they want and so you didn't want that beat now we did have a business reporter who kind of he loved getting these press releases but they also gave him the Tennessee Valley Authority as a sock so he would have some real

23:26in this country. And you get a sense of, you know, where the relationships are. And, you know, you didn't really cultivate sources in the business community. They did you no good. Nobody in the business community was really interested in being a source for somebody who was a journalist. It just really wasn't, it just wasn't seemly. Well, you cultivated your sources in government and in fact that if you got that phone call, that little anonymous tip, I remember once that I'll give you an idea of a story that I covered in my first year at the Chattanooga Free Press.

24:12There was a plant, it was a fertilizer plant and the equipment blew up and so it was equipment that was the water pollution control equipment. Well, now these guys had a real problem because their stuff coming out wasn't being treated. Well, what do you do about this? And so we first had a story about why, because somebody from the Water Quality Agency, one of our sources, called us up and said there's been an explosion at this particular plant. Well, of course, nobody from the plant called us up. I mean Jim Dickerson I remember was the plant manager at the time and I don't think he would have called us up but anyway I remember going to a water quality meeting on Saturday and another reporter and I nobody quite knew who we were we just sat there and said nothing then they had a private meeting with the with representatives from the Tennessee Water Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency and we managed to go in there and sit nobody really and finally somebody asked well who are these guys with and I thought it was the

25:19The World According to the Journalist

25:49If you go into a business, into any kind of enterprise, this is where you see the real world happening. This is where you see people making things, producing things, selling things. In a very real sense, making life better for people. You know, you go near and away for a long time. I go into the courthouses and into the government offices, and there I see the real backwater. But as a journalist, that view of the world was turned completely upside down. And I'm just giving you my own perspective. And one that I think that, you know, you start multiplying it and you get to understand some of the biases across the line.

26:35Also, the people who often go into journalism generally are going to have certain proclivities. There seems to me almost to be a self-selection bias going on. But there's something else too that I, in my observations, that what I have found over the years has been that journalists generally do not, they work for organizations. There's not a lot of selling something. Even though they create a product that ultimately the public consumes, in their minds, that's not the real customer. The customer is the entity for which they work and or some other publication, not the general public.

27:27Very, very few of them make money simply by selling things directly to other people. And often what happens is a bit of a disconnect. And what I find myself observing is that in these newsrooms across the country, that the makeup of people in some ways represents a college faculty. Now, and especially the Arts and Sciences faculty. And being at a university and not in the Arts and Sciences faculty, I'm in the business faculty and I find that there's a little more common sense that goes on among in discussions there. The arts and sciences faculty, we have people there, they really believe that if government provides a service, government has conquered the law of scarcity.

28:17In fact, to them, the law of scarcity really is contrived. It was something dreamed up by capitalists and if only the government could have its way with everything, We could abolish all work, all scarcity, life would be good. We would just party all the time. And you think, I'm exaggerating. I have seen things that some of the arts and sciences faculties have written. I mean, people really believe this sort of thing. And again, look at the disconnect. As faculty members, we do not directly sell our services to our customers. Now, ultimately, in the Mangerian sense, if you remember Carl Menger, one of his important insights, he was not just simply solving the issue of what we call marginal utility, but also it was Menger who pointed out that the value of the factors of production ultimately was derived from, or we would say, The Theory of Money and Credit

29:47Well, they're just trying to sell papers. They're writing, they're just trying to sell papers. Well, the journalist, in his or her world, that's not really a big deal to them. They're selling their work to their employer or to a publication. They're not trying to sell the publication. I'm talking about that larger publication. That's really not where they're at. In fact, there is going to be somewhat of a disconnect. Look, if you ever read the New York Times editorial page, day after day after day, or the Baltimore Sun. I remember, in fact, I used an example from the Baltimore Sun editorial.

30:34This editorial appeared 24 years ago, and the editorialist said that Americans obviously don't value education because professional athletes make more than teachers and so that was you know proof positive. Well I wrote something in the Freeman that appeared I think in August of 2000 entitled and praise of athletes high salaries and I took that and basically I said look this is an issue you know this is an example of the Diamond Water Paradox. Well it's very interesting you see that a journalist could not if you said Diamond Water Paradox you journalist this person might I might have a master's degree from Columbia University, but I can assure you that he or she would just have their eyes glazed over and, you know, you might as well try and explain the diamond water paradox to the wall over there.

31:21But read the New York Times, they believe that we can conquer poverty by raising minimum wages. That if we order the automobile companies to build automobiles, lots and lots of automobiles that get higher gas mileage, there's no opportunity cost to this. This would just simply produce nothing but benefits. It would help us save oil. Nothing about forcing automobile companies to spend billions of dollars in new capitalization for which there's little return. And if you said that, they can't understand. So you're really dealing with, I think, a real disconnect. And to a certain extent, you want to try to educate them.

32:06I know that the Political Economy Resource Center has done that over the years with journalists and environmental issues. And it sort of had mixed results. Ultimately these journalists go back to where they work and anything that they write that's against the zeitgeist of the day or the prevailing view is one in which it's a view that's going to be scorned. And sooner or later they realize, you know, if I keep writing stuff that's getting me scorned, you know, my employment, you know, things like raises and promotions, all these other things really, you know, start playing a role. I'll give you another example. It's more personal. I actually, and I will admit it in this room to these people now that it's being streamed over the internet, the whole world will know, that I actually am friends with Jack Abramoff.

33:01And yes, and no, I have not gotten any money from him. But we did have dinner in his house. But there was a national editor from the Washingtonian, named Kim Eisler, and he was interviewed by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. And he said, you know, I know Jack Abramoff. He really is not the monster that he's being portrayed in the press. Well, you can imagine, the next thing you know, I emailed Eisler about it, and he emails me back, and he says, Well, you're not going to believe it, I got a handwritten note from Chris Matthews telling me that I was defending a dirt bag that I was now the laughing stock of all his friends. He says, why would a guy who makes a million and a half a year take the trouble to do this?

33:48And to him, now he's got a problem, because now he's committed a major sin in the eyes of other journalists, and people who ultimately may decide some of his future. If you look, for example, at the Sunday morning news shows, you know, Phase the Nation, and Press the Meat, and the George Stephanopoulos show, or whatever that's called, you find And some other things too, again, people talk about the general consumption, the audience, the purpose of this is to educate Americans.

34:34Well no, you get a sense of what's going on when you look at the advertisements. Only on Sunday morning do you find that Arthur Daniels Midland really is the supermarket to the world. We don't see ADM advertisements the rest of the time. And you certainly will not see any ADM advertisements on the, you know, in the basketball that's being broadcast this week from the NC2A tournament. And again, you know, that you're dealing with the audience from, you know, the what gives goods character to the journalist, the real audience. It's kind of like in Hollywood. Again, I think that there's a real connection between journalism and what we see in Hollywood.

35:21People have this idea that movie producers are just simply out there trying to quote, make money. And then they're always puzzled, well gee, the G-movies do really well. Why do they keep giving us this R-rated stuff and the like? Well, you have to keep in mind that a lot of times producers really do not see the general public as their final customers. The people they're playing to are the Academy Awards people. Other people living in Hollywood. Nobody wants to be seen as the producer of G-movies, you've got to show some nudity once in a while, you've got to have some bad words, or something that's pushing the envelope. And so, again, you have to understand that we have this notion that what these people are saying they're doing is writing the news why to help educate the people.

36:11And sometimes there's complaints about those people. Recently, Aaron Brown, an ex-CNN broadcaster, complained that well, we were trying to give people real news and it's those damn people over at Fox and they're covering Natalie Holloway. We were trying to cover the tsunami and they gave us the Natalie Holloway story, you know, the girl who disappeared in Aruba. Of course, Natalie Holloway disappeared in around, I think, the beginning of June 2005 and the tsunami occurred in very late 2004. So maybe CNN was just getting around to covering the tsunami, I can't tell you. But the idea, of course, that there is this contempt ultimately for this public that they say they're trying to reach and trying to give them the news that they have to have.

37:02Well, again, how does the Austrian look at this? Well, number one, I think that the Austrian understands that an institution that was derived in the progressive era is not going to do what it supposedly is created to do. The modern journalism, with all of its canons of journalism, they were updated in 1975 by Sigma Delta Chi, which is the Society of Professional Journalists, and it's basically the same sort of thing.

37:47That modern journalism is not a regulator of the state, no matter what they say. These people are not the watchdogs of government. They are the lapdogs of government. I would like to give you a couple of anecdotes, again, to explain to you just how serious this particular problem is. I've written a lot about the case of Michael Milken and Rudy Giuliani, and any time I can get a little slapping against Giuliani, I'm always glad to do it. In the late 1980s, Giuliani decided that he was going to clean up Wall Street.

38:33Now it was presented in the press as the honest prosecutor simply looking and saying there are dishonest and wrong things going on on Wall Street and I've got to clean it up. Well in fact, what do we know? Let's face it, people, if it weren't for Michael Milken, our standard of living would be substantially lower today than it was. And there have been other papers presented about that, and that's as much as I can say with it. But certainly Milken's competitors didn't like him getting his clients, and they didn't like what Milken was doing. and Rudy Giuliani had, let's just say that he had aspirations of being more than just the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

39:24And so Giuliani started his raids, if you remember the raid on the trading floor at Princeton Newport Securities In which people were hauled out literally in chains and you had US marshals going in with loaded submachine guns with their fingers on the trigger going up against a bunch of unarmed traitors. And the idea like they were raiding a drug house in Southern California or something, or an illicit arms factory or something. Of course, why did they do that? because so the press could come behind and film all this and have the perp walk and these people dragged out and change obviously well we have a criminal here this must be dangerous crimes going on and in his investigation of Giuliani Milken found that things were you know things were being leaked to the Wall The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the two reporters here were Laurie Cohen and James Stewart.

40:39And what Giuliani was doing was leaking material from the grand jury. Now this is a felony. This is a real live on the books felony. And he kept leaking this material out and so what you had were a number of journalists aiding and abetting a felony. And of course they were all on a great crusade of course of law and order. And this went on and then later Giuliani leaked to Laurie Cohen a story that he was about to come in a new superseding indictment of a hundred more indictments for Milken. And Milken was getting ready to go to trial. He said, we have no idea. What are these indictments about? We have no idea.

41:28It turned out Giuliani didn't have any indictments. The whole thing was made up out of whole cloth. That, again, is a felony. It's called obstruction of justice. So what we had here, in the name, of course, of following the law, We had the destruction of a human being with journalists aiding and abetting a criminal or a prosecutor engaging in acts of criminality. And all of this is the public's right to know? I don't think so. What we're dealing with here is simply this incestuous relationship between the press and government. The Martha Stewart case is almost as egregious in that we had the leaking of testimony from congressional committees and also from the grand jury.

42:24Those also were felonies and they were doing it in order to make hits so that Martha Stock and Martha Stewart's company would take a hit and they were trying to get her to come meet with them because she was not going to be meeting with investigators. The Press and then her company would take a hit and then finally she did that to stop the bleeding and of course we all know what followed afterwards and I always love it when James Comey the prosecutor said well I was just trying to protect the interests of her stockholders again I don't think so I think that what we had was another example of a very incestuous relationship between the press and with government, you know, I could go on and on of these kinds of stories, certainly in the, you know, Mises understood the nature of bureaucracy and the idea of spreading bureaucracy, we have reporters all over the place, what do they do, you know, a lot of the, if you cover the EPA, what do you do, well, you cover the, you know, you always are talking about the need for more bureaucracy,

43:39and that if there's ever criticism of these government agencies, it's that they're not really doing enough regulating. They need to do even more regulating than they're already doing. And again, you see this relationship that really thrives on the growth of government. Well, if you think of the power of the press and what a free press was supposed to mean, The idea that a quote free press would be a major engine in making government grow simply doesn't compute It doesn't make sense. It certainly did not make a sense at the founding of you know, this country the The founders of this of the United States did not want a situation in which government was just going to continue to grow and grow And grow and grow and certainly they saw having a press as a check on that But once it became institutionalized, and once it became a progressive era institution, then we saw a whole new direction being taken.

44:48One that supported the growth of government, one that supported regulatory agencies and the like. And in fact, one that modeled that very incestuous relationship of the relationship between government and the private sector. This being government entities and the press. But I would like to also say that there is some hope on the horizon. That we are finding, for example, that the breakup of these large press entities, and I'm not talking about just as businesses, but what I mean also, the breakup in influence. If you think of the influence that Walter Cronkite had, no journalist has anywhere close to that today.

45:35And there are just literally too many choices out there for people. Now, journalists complain about this, and they blame the public for actually wanting choices. And they say, no, this isn't what you should be having. But also, the Internet has proven to be something far more powerful than anybody could have ever imagined. When we moved to Cumberland, Maryland in August of 2001, we had already adopted one child and we had two others that we were in the process of adopting that would be coming to us soon. And my wife and I decided not to get cable TV. And if you live in Cumberland, and Cumberland is right in the middle of a bunch of ridges, you don't have cable, you're not getting TV reception.

46:29And so we opted not to get TV reception, which is very tough for, I love college football, and so when my team is playing, sometimes I don't get to see them, that's tough, but I put up with that. Don't watch television news. Don't subscribe to a newspaper. How do I keep up? Well, it's pretty darn easy to be honest. It's a thing called the internet. And what we're finding with the internet is, in fact, to a certain extent, almost a return to the old days. Return to the Party Press and also a return to being able to get the story from a lot of different sources of what's going on.

47:21And you have some enterprising people who have jumped into this and I think they really are doing a great job. And so, you know, we're starting to see some real competition again that we hadn't seen in a long time. of Time. Of course, the big boys don't like it. The New York Times sure doesn't like it. I remember in the last election, Alex Jones, and I actually know Alex Jones because I used to work with him. And Alex was with the Times for many years. He got a Pulitzer Prize. Now he teaches journalism. Last time I checked in with him, he was teaching journalism at Duke University. And, you know, that Alex just was kind of sniffing about the bloggers. Well, you know, what could they know that a journalist, you know, a trained journalist doesn't, you know, doesn't know and the like.

48:12And it's kind of, although I look at it, the same analogy is the dartboard and the trained stock picker. And what they found over the years is that the dartboard works about as well as the supposedly, you know, highly trained securities expert. And certainly I think that the bloggers have done a very, very good job. If you want to take a Hayek interview of it, what we now see is a way to connect knowledge and information from across a really wide spectrum. And be able to put it together in a way that wasn't being done before. So I really see this as a positive development. The growth of government continues and one can only hope, but in conclusion, I would like to say that certainly the old, like everything else that came out of the progressive era, that the press as an institution is finally running into market forces that are forcing people to take a very, very different approach.

49:17to take a very, very different approach to things. Now, you're still going to have the staffs of the New York Times and the Washington Post basically having the fanciful views of somebody who's a member of the College of Liberal Arts someplace. But, they're also going to be countered by a lot of other people. And they are not going to have the same control over what goes over airwaves and what goes over the wires and what people read. I happen to think this is a good thing. And of course, and if we despair, I would also say that there is always mises.org and lewrockwell.com.

50:03Thank you very much.