If you’ve ever heard the idea that bad money, or cheap money, chases good money out of circulation, you’ve heard a description of Gresham’s Law. Dan Henninger, deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, says that same law seems to apply to information as well. He discussed his theory of a Gresham’s Law of information with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: How does Gresham’s Law apply to information?
Henninger: It’s my feeling – well, let’s define good information. Good information, I think, [is] cold, hard facts. You’re living in a politically dynamic world now where there are lots of things going on. People have opinions about those things. But first of all, the opinion has to be based on, presumably, a set of facts, whether it’s about what’s going on on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan, the financial crisis, Social Security, Medicare reform. The Democrats want to do a great big reform of health insurance, so one would think that under our system, or under our intellectual tradition, you’d have to have a fact base underneath that.
And it’s my sense that in the way people consume public information now — or at least the news — they’re not really getting many facts. They’re just getting a lot of interpretation of analysis with the journalists somehow assuming that people already know what the facts behind these subjects are. And my question is: why would you assume? Where do you think people would get their facts these days, if not from you guys, the journalists? So I think, as a result, people have to simply form opinions based on very little factual information and that, as a result, people make mistakes in their analysis because they really don’t have a basis for making these opinions. Over time, it gets worse, and bad information then drives out good information.
Kokai: You said in a recent John Locke Foundation presentation in Charlotte that this leads to groups of people on both sides of the political fence just parroting each other.
Henninger: Well, I think that’s right, that eventually people living in a context like this decide, look, if I’m going to be spun by the news, I might as well be spun in a direction that I feel comfortable with — to the right or to the left — and so they migrate over to these Web sites and blogs that are congenial to their politics, and so they can hang around with people who think the way they do. And my fear is that — I think that’s fine, it’s fun, politics is fun — but in the absence of a place, a kind of a public square where everyone can go to get a simple set of facts, that you end up with, in effect, a kind of groupthink — what I call red-think or blue-think.
And all people know is what they have learned on the right or on the left from these opinion people. And there’s a reason, then, why it becomes difficult for politics to happen. You can, on the one hand, say all I do is talk to people on the right, or all I do is talk to people on the left, but I’m disgusted with Congress because they never get anything done. Why do you think they can’t ever get anything done? Because they themselves have become affected by this kind of pushing in both directions without any sort of — and I’m not talking about the center, I’m not saying there’s a sort of center where everybody should gather. My center is a center where a set of facts exists that you can at least argue over. But if you don’t have that, then all you’re doing is arguing.
Kokai: You’ve said that this pattern leads to more vitriol, more attacks, and less intellectual debate.
Henninger: Yeah. And I think that’s a kind of result of the situation I’m describing, where if people become deeply frustrated about politics and they don’t seem to feel that anything is happening, they become upset, they become frustrated, and they look for people or things that are causing their side not to be making any progress. And that’s when the language starts to become more intense. And you get a situation as you do in many other countries.
The United States has always been pretty good. The Founding Fathers set up a pretty good system of having to work out differences and negotiating, do a little bit of compromising, so the system can go forward. Not quickly, but at least go forward. But the country is getting a little bit more like some of the European systems where sides are just simply divided forever, and all you do is fight very intensely. You get to the point where it’s a little bit dangerous if it gets too intense because people become inconsolable in their dissatisfaction with the system.
Kokai: So in what ways did this phenomenon — bad information driving out good information — play out in the 2008 election?
Henninger: I think it’s almost more interesting, in a way, in the way it played out in the Democratic Party than in the Republican Party because Barack Obama supposedly brought a lot of new people into the process and the system. But you know, a lot of the new people who came into the Democratic Party — it’s not so much that they were new to the party, but their voices were more important — came from the Democratic left. In the Democrats you could say there are sort of standard-brand liberals, and people a bit to the left of center, and then you have the Democratic left, which is represented by groups like the Daily Kos and Moveon.org. And I think that the Democrats have set themselves up so that they have, literally, factions within their own party.
And again, the Founders always warned against the danger of factions. These people are so well organized now, and because of the Web, they’re able to get their message out day after day after day, in a way that will make it very difficult for the elected politicians to function because they’re constantly being beaten from these voices coming out of the Web and out of talk radio. They’ve become a little bit leery about doing anything. I’m sure there are people, as I noted in the [Charlotte] talk, that say, “Hey, that’s great if the politicians never do anything. We’ll be safe.”
That’s fine for most of the time, but you know, Iran is trying to acquire nuclear capability. The Israelis are very upset about that. There is a lot of talk about maybe Israel bombing an Iranian nuclear reactor. There is a point at which you actually need a political system that can function and respond, and I don’t think we want to get to the point where ours is so bogged down in these political arguments and partisan fighting that when we need it, it isn’t there to protect us or to respond.
Kokai: You’ve identified a problem. Do you have some ideas about what we can do about it?
Henninger: I personally would like to see — to tell you the truth I’d like to see the newspapers take the lead in this. I think my own newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, actually does a pretty good job of trying to get the facts straight in the stories it reports. In large part, that has to do with the fact that we do report a lot about business and finance. People have money on the table invested. You can affect share price, so you’re trying to get the story right.
And I think if the newspapers didn’t worry so much about the Web and about television being a source of information, and themselves began to provide more factual reporting, that people would come to them looking for that set of facts, that sort of basis for thinking about politics. And certainly newspapers can do all these other things as well, but some institution out there has got to figure out a way to tell people simply what’s going on without reducing it to opinion, and I think newspapers could do that.
Kokai: Carolina Journal Radio listeners are among the most devoted consumers of news. Is there anything they can do?
Henninger: I think they can scream bloody murder … say who reports the facts anymore, and where can I get them? Not to toot your horn, but as I said in my talk, when I get asked this by people — where can I find things out — I tell them, well, one place is the Web site of think tanks, like the John Locke Foundation or like the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings, Heritage, Cato. Sure, they’re all affiliated — and this is a pretty good example of the way the system could work — they’re affiliated with the left or the right to some extent, right of center, left of center.
But in their white papers, invariably you find at the outset, a description of what the issue is, what the facts are behind it, what the debate is. And then they go on to present their interpretation of it. But at least you have some sense of what the issue is all about — Medicare, health insurance, Social Security. So what I tend to tell people is, that’s a good source of getting an overview of a subject.