Year: 2013

Finally, a handful of journalists are beginning to tell the truth about the accelerating fusion of journalism with advertising:

One could say, “Oh, magazines. That industry has always been a brothel.” Which is true – although not of the news and public policy segments. And one could say, “Tut tut. TV was whoring itself to audiences long before anyone ever uttered the words ‘click bait.'” Which is also true.

The problem is, it is decreasingly useful to separate these industries by medium. Text, audio and video are rapidly converging. As journalism brands grow to look more like one another, we are seeing unmistakable signs of publishers slouching toward an ethical lowest common denominator.

Anyone who cares deeply about quality, independent journalism should pray for paywalls and other subscription models to take hold. Because in the world of the smart and the desperate, desperate always has the last word.

I was particularly taken by the remarks of this commenter, rebutting the argument that all this change is inevitable. It isn’t. And the change is not a new way for journalism; it’s euthanizing its critical, independent role in a democratic society:

You don’t think it matters that the industry that is responsible for the dissemination of information is increasingly ceding editorial control to PR firms simply to stay afloat?

Democracy is a market in which politicians design policies to get votes. Like any market, it relies on information and signals being reliably transmitted from producer to consumer and vice versa. In a situation where the producer can effectively block the signals that actually their policies are designed simply to siphon wealth from everyone else into the pockets of the rich, what do you think happens to that market? Yep, that’s right, you get a choice between red, blue and yellow versions of producers all with the same agenda.

We are reaching a point at which there will be many fewer actual media companies, and more and more companies which learn to mimic what used to be journalism in order to sell their products. We’ve gone from advertizing supporting journalism to journalism supporting corporate propaganda. At the rate we’re going, as the line between church and state is deliberately blurred by desperate media companies, we may end up with a handful of actual independent online magazines and newspapers and a vast industry of corporate propaganda designed to look like the real thing. If we’re lucky.

(Photo: one of Tom Scott’s Journalism Warning Labels)

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Gary Becker ponders the drop-off in illegal immigration from Mexico:

Once the American economy resumes its long-term growth path with full employment (it has not been on this path for the past 4 years), the economic pull from the US should return to where it had been before the economic crisis. However, the push from Mexico has been decreasing and should continue its downward path for the foreseeable future. One important cause is the sharp decline in Mexican birth rates during the past couple of decades.

Not long ago Mexico was a country with high birth rates that produced many young adults who had trouble finding jobs. Now, the Mexican total fertility rate (TFR)- the number of children born to a typical woman over her lifetime- has plummeted to about 2.25. This rate is only a little above the population replacement rate of 2.1. Unlike in the past, the number of young people in Mexico will no longer be growing rapidly over time, so that the numbers looking for work in the Mexican labor market will be on the decline.

The push from Mexico has also diminished because its economy has been growing at a good clip during the past 9 years. Excluding the large drop in 2009, the growth rate in real GDP has been over 4% per year. Mexico’s growth rate after 2009 considerably exceeds the American rate of under 2%, which is remarkable since about 80% of all Mexican exports go to the depressed American economy. One consequence is that the gap between earnings in Mexico and the United States is narrowing. This clearly reduces the demand to immigrate to America, especially under the difficult circumstances illegal immigrants face.

A reader counters a previous one:

“Unlike alcohol, where the proof is written on the bottle and assured by regulators, you can only gauge THC levels through trial-and-error or your dealer’s sales patter.” That’s another artifact of prohibition.  I work for an edibles company here in Colorado, we’ve developed a method of adding very precise amounts of active THC in food that’s already been prepared. Our big sellers are bags of 25 candies that each have just ten milligrams of THC in them.  An equivalent to e-cigarettes have also become popular among patients, which you can use to take very tiny puffs of vapor until you feel medicated enough and even the potency of the extract you vaporize can be controlled to some degree.  Both my company (as well as all edibles manufacturers) and companies filling cartridges for vapor pens are byproducts of a thriving and regulated cannabis industry; neither is practical for the black market and neither can be done at home.  Another byproduct of an industry is that there are a couple labs where I think anybody can take a sample of something to be tested for cannabinoid content.

Your reader is also incorrect in his supposition about the potency of black market pot.

It’s actually quite hard, and quite expensive to produce marijuana with much about 16% THC; 12% or 13% would be more likely for street weed, you might get as much as 8% in Mexican brickweed.  It’s impossible to go above that in an outdoor grow, and indoors getting a plant to its full potential potency requires growing them inches from thousand watt floodlights but not letting them get above 75 degrees with the lights on.  Not only does the expense produce diminishing returns but the air conditioning is incredibly conspicuous.

Further, the strains that can produce high potency tend to have much lower per-plant yields and black market growers grow for yield above all else.  Breeding really has increased potential potency but high-end growing/breeding like that and black market growing are two very different worlds that don’t actually intersect much.  The only major overall increase in the potency of black market marijuana happened when sinsemilla – growing only unpollinated female plants so they spend their energy creating THC-laden resin rather than seeds – became the standard, and that happened in the ’70s. Everything about increased potency on the street since then has been pure propaganda.

Update from a reader:

I thought the reader was not actually contradicting either of the points in the previous post (lack of dosage information and increased potency of weed since the 1970s are artifacts of prohibition), but he too casually dismisses as “propaganda” the notion that black market pot has increased in purity.

It’s common knowledge that cannabis quality and availability has increased steadily since the 1970s. The reader confuses the THC content of the plant with the purity of the product. In 1993, a New Yorker buying weed in Washington Square Park was likely to get a few grams of junk, seeds, and stems mixed in with his baggie. Today, black market product in the city is sold by reputable delivery services who compete to provide quality and variety. Whether this is a result of increased crop yields or increased THC content in the cannabis plant is immaterial: you will get a much larger dose of THC from a gram of 2013 delivery weed than from the same gram purchased on the street 20 years ago. A similar – and much more dangerous – phenomenon has occurred with harder drugs like heroin, where overdoses can lead to death.