Does Market-Driven Information Accurately Reflect Public Demand?
Returning to our main story, one might argue that the trend toward market-driven, sensationalistic information actually gives people what they really want, and that democracy cannot aspire to be better than its citizen-consumers would have it. Indeed, there is evidence that people do get something of value from the scandals, human tragedies, and big screen celebrity melodramas of the day. I have even contributed to this line of argument in analyzing media content and public attention to the Clinton scandals (Lawrence, Bennett and Hunt, 1999). However, the capacity of media consumers to sift bits of meaning from the commercial information flow does not mean that popular demand, alone, explains the information trends. Nor does the fact of consumption, whether pleasurable or not, mean that people are objectively any better off following the intake of such information than they are after adapting to a diet of junk food and suffering the consequences of obesity and hardening of the arteries
