The press as a public institution

CNBC reports that journalists from MSNBC, CNN, and Politico were denied entry to the White House after the administration formally banned those outlets, citing displeasure with their coverage. I will take that lead at face value and reason from it — because the principle it raises is one I care about as deeply as any tariff or chartered monopoly.

Consider what the press actually does in the architecture of a well-ordered society. It performs, for the citizen, something very like the function that price signals perform in a market: it aggregates and transmits information that no single person could gather alone. A merchant who cannot learn the price at the next fair is at a disadvantage; a voter who cannot learn what her government is doing is at a worse one. The suppression of a price signal harms the buyer. The suppression of a news report harms the public.

I wrote, in The Wealth of Nations, at considerable length about the tendency of those who control a trade to arrange matters in their own interest at the expense of the consumer. The chartered monopolist does not suppress competition because he hates the competitor — he suppresses it because competition disciplines him, forces accountability, and narrows his margin of private advantage. A sovereign who bars inconvenient reporters is engaged in precisely the same operation, only the commodity being monopolized is information about the exercise of power itself.

The moral foundation here is sympathy — the capacity to imagine oneself in another's position that I described in The Theory of Moral Sentiments as the ground of all honest dealing. An administration that cannot bear to be observed has, in effect, withdrawn from the compact of mutual accountability that makes self-government possible. It is asking the citizen to trust without the means of verification — which is to say, it is asking the citizen to be credulous rather than informed.

I speak with appropriate humility about the technical specifics of modern media law, which belong to an era I could not have known. But the institutional question is as old as commerce itself: what framework disciplines the exchange? For trade, the answer is contract law, honest weights, and open competition. For governance, the answer is a free press — not a press the sovereign finds agreeable, but one it finds inconvenient enough to fear. The moment a government can select which witnesses attend its proceedings, the proceedings cease to be public in any meaningful sense. The consumer of political information is left, as the buyer in a rigged market, with the seller's own account of the transaction. That has never been a satisfactory arrangement.