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A Note on Censorship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Gordon Tullock
Gordon Tullock*
Affiliation:
Rice University
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Extract

In Toward a Mathematics of Politics I presented a model of reciprocal interaction between information media and the opinions held by members of the community. It is the purpose of this note to apply a somewhat simplified version of this model to the specific problem of censorship. Testable hypotheses will be deduced and implications which may be of importance for policy will be suggested.

Suppose the population of the country are arrayed on some issue dimension. It makes little difference for our present purposes what the dimension itself represents. It might, for example, indicate the degree of nudity of pictures of women in men's magazines or the strength with which the views of Castro are supported. Let us suppose that the distribution along this issue dimension declines at one, end, as shown in Figure 1. Note that the remainder of the distribution can be any shape; in fact, I have drawn in three dashed lines for three possible distributions. If we assume, not unreasonably, that most people who are in the business of producing public information seek to maximize readership, then we would anticipate that in a competitive market the information media would be spread over the possible positions in this line in much the same pattern as the population. Put more bluntly, the managers of such organizations as Time, Newsweek, and CBS go where the customers are.

Type
Research Notes
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 62 , Issue 4 , December 1968 , pp. 1265 - 1267
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1968

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References

1 Toward a Mathematics of Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), pp. 82–99Google Scholar.

2 Even the requirement that the distribution decline at one end is not necessary. A highly abstract version of the theorems developed below can be presented with any distribution covering a finite interval.

3 The relationship between the publication distribution and the distribution of the opinions of the consumers of the publications is complicated by two factors. One is economies of scale, and the second is the poor information held by the operators of the media on public preferences. Working out the implications of these two modifying factors is tedious and difficult. Readers interested in this aspect of the matter should turn to Chapters V and VI (pp. 82–99) of Toward a Mathematics of Politics. For our present purposes, however, an extremely simplified model which ignores these factors is a suitable mapping of the more complex basic model. One aspect of the basic model should be mentioned. Due to the very large economies of scale to be found in the field of media production, areas where customers are dense are characterized not by many publications, but by a few large, heavily capitalized journals.