I thought I'd begin with a posting copy from today's Pundit Round-up, particularly Thomas Friedman's Op-Ed "Connecting Nature's Dots".
I began to wonder about Op-Ed readership and the democratization of puditry. De Sola Pool's notion of contradictory distribution models of property rights might be particularly helpful in reference to the difference between broadcast and cable, and of course now complicated with broadband and the Internet. If one accepts the premise that public opinion is constructed not unlike mass media audiences, interactivity in the form of Op-Ed punditry can be a useful tool for policy analysis.
For example, are op-eds diminishing in value because of weblogs or even twitter, just as news has been similarly dispersed? Is there or will there be no difference between news information and its deliberately framed interpretion as editorial commentary? What evidence supports those claims? How less valuable is information labeled as news and does it place greater emphasis on the property value of the transmission medium?
This continues work on a theory of virtual capital and its political economy which will be touched on here at times.
