that I’m saying that free market, caring-about-the-bottom-line journalistic ethics always leads to ethical journalism. I’m certainly not. What I am saying is that the market provides adequate incentives promoting ethical journalism, and the exceptions you noted are great examples, not exceptions, of such things.

Jim Gray discovered, just as a brewer of bad beer or baker of bad bread would discover, is that if you deliver a complete lemon to the market (whether it is or not in your personal view or mine, the market seemed to think so, and you and I are just a small piece of it), the market will respond in kind. I have no idea whether or not Michael Wilbon or Mark Stein were offered the piece and said, “not with a ten foot pole,” or something to that effect, but if they are journalists with better foresight than Gray, it would certainly be consistent.

The issue of the AP / Torre or the PG / Steelers is a bit different and more nuanced:

When the AP allows Torre to script questions or the Post-Gazette engages in creative writing or spin to cast the Steelers in a more favorable, if less truthful, light, this damages their credibility. A hit on their credibility is a hit on their bottom line. Maybe.

I say maybe because of the following: Joe Torre and the people who make up the Pittsburgh Steelers organization are endowed with a right to free speech. They can talk or not talk to whomever they want. Market demand for coverage of these firms exists. So they engage in a sort of contract, however formal or informal: I’ll talk to you if I get to choose the questions. You can have some privileged access to the Steelers if you cast us in a positive light.

Some may call this a compromise of ethics. Maybe it is, in the sense that it makes the journalist’s product less genuine. If the journalist’s product is perceived to be less genuine, it has less market value.

What it certainly is are two firms (the journalist and either one of the sports firms) engaging in mutually beneficial market behavior. Torre and the Steelers gets press coverage they are willing to handle, and the journalist gets information to print or broadcast. The consumer gets a product they are willing to buy or sit through advertisements to consume. It may not be perfect, but it’s superior to the sports firms exercising their right to free speech and remaining silent: the journalist will be left with no marketable product and the consumer will have nothing.

A sub-optimal product is superior to no product at all. At least that’s what the public’s demand seems to think, and that demand will be met appropriately by the market.

You may say this is a failure of the market incentives to work or the market incentives working as they should or somewhere in between. You could probably justify any of the above. What I want to make clear is that non-market incentives (such as a non-market-oriented code of journalistic ethics) would not improve matters. No system of incentives works perfectly, including (especially?) non-market incentives. In spite of death penalty being a very legitimate consequence, rapes, murders, and treason still happen. In spite of laws against trading on insider information in the United States, there hardly less insider ownership or trading that goes on in the U.S. relative to countries that don’t have such laws. In spite of the fact that prescription medications are expensive to develop and market and the civil penalties for marketing a bad one are high, bad drugs still make it to market. In spite of a code, written or unwritten, of journalistic ethics, bad journalism still prints and broadcasts.

This doesn’t mean the market failed or that working for the bottom line is a bad thing. It just means that consumers must always maintain a healthy diligence and skepticism of all goods and services they consume. Journalism is no different, and it wouldn’t be any different if journalists didn’t concern themselves with a bottom line.