Surely you mean “unwilling”? If not, what’s the problem?

The most commerically successful news in the UK (and i suspect the USA) is tabloid ‘news’. Much of the content of the tabloids would be described by economists as lemons. The papers facing the most conspicuous economic problems are ‘non lemons’ eg the Independent, WSJ etc. To elaborate this – people seem to like buying news lemons – high quality, truthfulness etc is not an attribute they value using conventional micro economic signals. Personally, i don’t think this is great for society but it refelcts an underlying ‘market failure’. This behaviour poses problems for incentives in the micro markets the author suggests.

At the heart of this paradox is the public good nature of unbiased news. Such news has many charactersitics of education goods – the benefit is often not appreciated ex ante so demand and price and thus supply are depressed below socially optimal levels, requiring government intervention to raise production and stimulate consumption – eg in the UK the BBC and extensive regulation of TV news for impartiality. In education governments make consumption mandatory and either produce themselves or subsidise production. The unusual demoractic value of news goods means of course that such a response to market failure would be inappropriate.

Developing micro markets – eg ebays as the author suggests – does not as far as i can see tackle the public good problem and therefore won’t hit the lemon problem which to my mind which is subservient.

The author’s own description of his atypical news consumption is indicative:

‘I personally don’t read the news much at all. If I am interested in a topic I research the field, get input from experts, and make my own inferences. I of course do not engage much in casual conversation. For the majority of citizens who do, news is an invaluable source to relate with others and share experiences of ‘true events’ and common knowledge.’