The marketplace of misleading ideas

In the marketplace of ideas, are people shopping for truth?

Are citizens of modern, liberal democracies—democratic societies that encourage a thriving public sphere unconstrained by top-down informational control and censorship—capable of forming accurate, informed political opinions? In the last post, I explored four reasons for pessimism: complexity, invisibility, rational ignorance, and politically motivated cognition. In this post, I will move away from individual-level biases and constraints and focus on the broader social conditions that structure media and the public sphere within open societies.

It is a popular idea that the “truth” will emerge from a free and open marketplace of ideas. Although appealing in some ways, this optimism is naive.

I mentioned some of the problems it confronts in the last post.

For example, in contrast with most consumer goods and services, it is unclear how ordinary citizens can reliably evaluate the ideas circulating within the public sphere. Figuring out the truth about complex political issues is highly challenging. If people are selling untruths—simplistic, unfounded, or inaccurate ideas—how would ordinary citizens know?

It is also unclear why most citizens would be motivated to acquire political information, let alone engage in time-intensive political debate, in a system—democracy—where individual voters have almost no say in collective decisions.

In this post, I will explore another issue, one which I have written about elsewhere, both in published academic research and on this blog: In practice, the “marketplace of ideas” within liberal democracies often functions like a marketplace of rationalisations, an informational economy in which pundits, journalists, intellectuals, and media outlets compete to produce justifications of the claims, narratives, and decisions favoured by different political and cultural tribes in society.

First, however, it is helpful to consider a very different—and more influential—critique of the optimistic assumptions associated with the concept of a marketplace of ideas.