Economists have long understood that people and institutions who engage in discrimination on irrelevant grounds have to pay a price for doing so. The classic example is major league baseball, where the teams that held out the longest against employing talented black players suffered lower winning percentages as a consequence of their owners’ racial bias.
So what about the media?
In his NRO column today, Bruce Bartlett explores first the increasingly strong evidence of left-wing bias in the media and then asks the interesting question: Will the harm it does to the bottom line cause media outlets to temper or abandon their leftism?
In some cases, probably not. The Ted Turners of the world may not care that their media investments are unprofitable or less profitable than they could be, viewing them less as financial investments than as toys to be used for their pleasure, including brainwashing other people. That’s one of the Schumpeterian problems with capitalism. It allows some people to get so rich that they can invest in newspapers, TV networks, and so forth and not even worry about ROI. Still, to paraphrase Jefferson, “I will defend to the death your right to get rich, even though I disagree with the disposition of your wealth.”
