WVU professor takes an economist’s look at free media
A West Virginia University professor has just published Media, Development, and Institutional Change, a book that investigates the media’s critical role in institutional change and economic development.
While doing research on Romania’s transition from communism to capitalism, Dr. Christopher Coyne, assistant professor of economics at the College of Business and Economics, recognized the importance of a free media as a check on government and as a means of providing information to citizens regarding political and economic reforms.
Coyne says that the media serves as an important mechanism for change because of its ability to communicate information to large groups of people.
“Anytime you have widespread institutional change such as reform or a major political upheaval, there are collective action problems,” said Coyne. “The media serves as a device to overcome this problem by reaching the masses and coordinating actions to generate change.”
A free media is especially important in poor, developing countries, whose political, social and economic institutions are often dysfunctional.
In the book, coauthored with Dr. Peter Leeson of George Mason University, Coyne argues for a media completely free of government interference in a competitive and diverse environment. He says media should be open to both domestic and international investors to ensure a diversity of views and a variety of media outlets.
According to Coyne, only about a third of the world benefits from a completely free media. Coyne believes that the United States’ current debate over media bias, while important, is a secondary issue to ensuring the basic freedom of media in the rest of the world.
The book identifies both specific media-related policies conducive and harmful to the growth of underdeveloped countries.
The impact of media on the growth of a society is displayed in the book through statistical analysis as well as through case studies of Poland and Russia’s transition from communism to capitalism. Coyne says that Poland, unlike Russia, has a free media today because of their free market approach to media privatization.
“During the economic downturn of the early nineties, Poland allowed many media outlets to either collapse or be financed by foreign investors,” said Coyne. “Russia, however, offered subsidies and tax breaks…but used them to implicitly circumvent the media’s freedom and to achieve favorable reporting of the government.”
Coyne acknowledges that the book’s policy conclusions may results in corporate consolidation in some types of media, but he argues that this is preferable to government control because it provides low barriers to entry encouraging a diversity of media outlets and viewpoints. “A government dictating what the media can or cannot do allows the government to squash information threatening to those in power and opens doors to special interest group pressure,” said Coyne.
Coyne is confident that recent developments in technology and fringe media outlets will continue to provide competition to traditional major media sources, building a positive media environment with diverse opinions and ideas.
Dr. Coyne published After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy in 2008. He is the North American editor for The Review of Austrian Economics and was the F.A. Hayek Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2008.
Before coming to WVU, Coyne was assistant professor of economics at Hampden-Sydney College. He earned a doctoral and master’s degree in Economics from George Mason University and a bachelor’s degree from Manhattan College.
The book is currently available for pre-order at Amazon.com.
