Newspaper industry, and airwaves/tv/radio creates fake news because of its market structure. Show that fake news is a result of oligopoly behaviour in two different media industries.
Please answer this question in two different parts. 2200 words each.
Section 1:
Question: Newspaper Journalism produces misinformation due to its inherent market structure, where firms behave in an oligopolistic manner.
Fake news was generated from the newspaper industry because of oligopolistic competition in its market structure. Prove that there are oligopolistic characteristics in the market throughout history, which may have caused firms to create fake news in order to compete.
Section 2:
Question: Radio/television Journalism produces misinformation due to its inherent market structure, where firms behave in an oligopolistic manner.
Fake news was generated from the radio/tv industry because of oligopolistic competition in its market structure. Prove that there are oligopolistic characteristics in the market throughout history, which may have caused firms to create fake news in order to compete.
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Please use the time periods 1880’s until present to prove that fake news has been made because of oligopolistic market characteristics.
Show that fake news is a result of oligopoly behaviour.
Please find historical evidence and economic analysis and statistics to prove this.
The following information was from ‘Truth Decay’ which you can download here, which was a very useful source.
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR2300/RR2314/RAND_RR2314.pdf
In the 1880s and 1890s newspapers created fake news in an era known as ‘yellow journalism’.
This stopped with a precipitated shift in journalistic norms and practices and the rise of the “muckrakers”—journalists who conducted deep investigations to uncover evidence of government or corporate corruption, a predecessor of today’s (usually respected) “investigative” journalism. Reporters might have been doing investigative journalism while yellow journalism was thriving, but their articles seem to have been overwhelmed by other, less-rigorous reporting. e attention muckrakers paid to collecting and exposing all the facts might have shifted the pendulum away from sensationalized news stories and back toward facts and analysis, reducing uncertainty and increasing confidence in the media and other institutions.
In the 1920’s and 1930’s there was a rise of rise of jazz journalism, where tabloid journalism created fake news.
The rise of tabloids also challenged more-established newspapers, which were forced to di erentiate themselves as “real journalism” while also fighting to keep their readers. To compete, the more-established publications shifted toward o ering a higher concentration of non- news content, such as advice columns, short stories, and other serial- ized or editorial content. (Musser,2007)
Tabloids continued to thrive in the 1930s but lost favor in the 1940s, as journalists took the responsibility of reporting the events of World War II. (Steve Vaughn, 2008.)
