Robert Hansen, a business professor at Dartmouth University, has drawn some interesting conclusions about the role of investigative reporting in the 21st century mainstream media. His argument uses some important aspects of information cascade theory.

The catalyst for his observations stems from the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict we all remember from two summers ago. He believes that even though Israel gained the strategic victory, Hezbollah “won the communications war” due to their savvy control of the media. This is all he says about the issue, and moves on to a more general analysis of investigative journalism.

With the increase in use of online news sources, mainstream media are cutting their budgets, which equates to dropping reporters, and thus decreasing the amount of investigative journalism. In his view, this paves the way for cascades and herding. He gives the example of a news story. As always, you have private information that tells you whether a story is true or not, and you also observe how many people pass the story on to others. If you assume people only pass of true stories, then after the first two people have passed the story on, you must assume that it is true and pass it on, leading to a cascade. The problem with this, he says, is that we don’t know anything about the first two people who passed the story on; they may have had bad information. As a result, many untrue stories will be passed around and taken as fact (leading to the reason why he believes Hezbollah won the communications war).

Hansen also talks about herding in the media. With the lack of independent investigative journalism, when a network sees a story other networks are running, they are more inclined to run it too even though they may have done no research on its validity.

Towards the end, a quote from Hansen summarizes the problems with the media and information cascading perfectly: “Amazingly, in this new world of technology, we are getting less information being produced, yet more (false) consensus in the world on what is truth, and therefore worse decisions being made.”

Link: http://robertghansen.blogspot.com/2006/09/decline-of-mainstream-media-and-theory.html