The market cannot be expected to provide the audience what it wants. Although I have not attempted empirical measurements, the divergence between what the market produces and what people want can be expected to be massive.

Each of the first four chapters supported this conclusion. Chapters 1 and 2 explained how the public-good aspect of media products leads to too little production and distribution. Chapter 2 showed that the nature of monopolistic competition in media products can lead less-valued media products to prevail competitively. Monopolistic competition tends to favor blockbuster products over more diverse and smaller media products that people often want more. Chapter 3 observed that media products produce tremendous positive and negative externalities. Market processes produce excessive amounts of media products with negative externalities and insufficient amounts of those with positive externalities. Finally, Chapter 4 observed, first, that there is no reason to expect that market mechanisms for identifying and weighing people's preferences lead to objectively correct results. It then argued that there are good reasons to think that the market as a measurement device for media preferences diverges dramatically from how people actually want their preferences measured and from how a democratic people should want them measured when “want” is properly understood. That is, Chapter 4 claims to be more realistic and more normatively defensible than a typical market perspective in understanding the way people actually do and should understand their preferences.

Thus, from the perspective of providing people what they want, media markets are subject to the following criticisms.