The spirit was nice, but something is odd about the argument at TCS that runs this way. CBS didn’t know that its Bush memos were suspicious but the blogs did and corrected the record even before CBS could investigage. The suggests that Hayek is correct that a spontaneous, decentralized system of knowledge dispersal works more efficiently than a centralized one. There is a good case to be made against the mainstream media, of course, and the blogosphere is great. But why resort to Hayekian explanations in this case? What is to be gained by dragging in the knowledge argument here?
Both CBS and the blogs are private (not government) and both have every incentive to convey information that is not fraudulent. CBS certainly possesses the means; it just should have done better research, and good for blogs to keeping the heat on. But what has Hayek got to do with it? (Several articles on why the core issues for the defense of the market over government planning are not communication and knowledge but property and choice: 1, 2, 3).
In any case, Alex Tabarrok draws our attention to the post at Crooked Timber showing that it wasn’t the blogs that were behind the CBS debunking but an Atlanta lawyer with big-time GOP connections (a revelation first reported in The Wash Post). CT further speculates that the White House itself is communicating with bloggers. So much for decentralized knowledge. Perhaps in politics, there are times when centralization is more efficient.
