Masherg’s Law: A New View of Junk News

10 min readDec 21, 2022

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Herbert A. Simon

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,” wrote the famous scientist Herbert Simon in 1969. There was no cable television and no social media cluttering our brains. Yet the problems of overload were already there and growing worse. Masherg’s Law, which says the flood of bad information will drown out the good, had already started.[1]

Any product purchase is based on price and quality. Oddly, the customer price for most news is zero, supported by hidden payments to news suppliers.[1] Perhaps we would consume less junk news if we had to pay. Without price, consumers can only use quality to choose, which is hard for the news. It is much easier for a tangible product like a car.

Bad Information Drives Out Good Information

Lexus cars are famous for their high quality. The Yugo is on lists of the worst cars. Consumers can tell the difference. Lexus cars sell well, but the Yugo never did and buyers are unwilling to pay for low quality.

But how can a consumer tell with news products? With Masherg’s Law, flood of junk news overwhelms the trickle of good information.[2] Quality news is hard to find in the flood of information. Few of us has the time, knowledge, or energy to search the internet for good information. Unlike cars, consistent rigorous news quality assessment is complicated for consumers.

The Washington Post published an article “Here’s who helped Elon Musk buy Twitter,” on December 26, 2022. It listed eight major contributors including national investment funds, venture capitalists, and individuals. One reader said, “Many thanks to the writers and editors for the clarity of this piece. I’ve wanted to know the answer to these questions but lacked time/resources to learn.”

Such research is valued because suppliers can shovel out huge volumes of information with little concern about facts by using modern technology . They are driven by low-cost content with low-cost distribution to get maximum revenue from secondary payment systems.

Critically important, secondary payment systems mean consumers often directly pay nothing for news. And with price perceived to be zero, there is no economic incentive to tell good information from bad.

“It would be a disservice to the consumers of news — be they readers, listeners, or viewers — for me to become emotional and to get carried away.” Bernard Shaw

In 2001, Washington State University awarded Bernard Shaw, then a news anchor on CNN, the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Broadcasting. During his acceptance speech, Shaw spoke about the risk to news accuracy posed by low-quality, profit-driven television content, saying, “People are depending on you for accuracy, dispassionate descriptions of what’s happening.”[3]

Headlines have become attention-grabbers. Those expressing anger, fear, disgust, and sadness have increased steadily since 2000, with a decrease in emotionally neutral headlines.[3a] Nefarious on one hand, yet understandable on the other. Media is competing for our limited attention span.

Suppliers Overload Consumers Attention Span

Suppliers learn consumers’ habits, feeding them what they want, sustaining a cycle of consumption. One tactic is to create consumer allegiance to the news supplier, regardless of costs to the consumer or society. Each supplier protecting its self-interest is akin to the invisible hand, ever growing in the new global commons of news information. When supplier self-interest ignores externalities, consumers and society pay the cost.

The overload of information is the modern equivalent of Garrett Hardin’s grazing commons[4] where it is not cows overgrazing a finite pasture. Instead, it is suppliers overloading the finite attention span of each person and community, destroying our individual and collective abilities to process information. Masherg’s Law assures the volume of information will continue to surpass our ability to pay attention. When that happens, consumers may exit the market, choosing not to consume any information and weakening the information market.

Deadweight Loss and Induced Demand

Economically, deadweight loss is the cost of market inefficiency such as imbalanced supply and demand. Traditional economics looks at prices, often driven by three main causes: taxes (increasing price paid), price floors (minimum wage), or price ceiling (rent control).

In each case they influence the price paid by consumers and revenue received by suppliers. Traditional deadweight loss calculators require price and quantity but with not quality. With news, the consumer perceives a price of zero and quantity nearly infinite.

Perhaps the loss occurs with quality variations, not price. Masherg’s Law asserts itself again, with the flood of bad information driving out good information. Deadweight loss cannot be determined.

Induced demand is driven by the flood of information. Similar to expanding roadways leading to more traffic clogging the expanded roadways, more information consumes more computing power, network bandwidth, and — most importantly our attention span.

Like indirect funding of freeways through taxes, suppliers use indirect compensation to increase consumption of information. Supplier product pathways are paved with social media influencers supported by supplier-paid advertising. These media influencers are driven to increase consumption, on a different mission than an editorially guided news anchor. Good information is lost in the deluge of bad information.

Suppliers benefit, consumers suffer

Suppliers benefit from Masherg’s Law, not consumers. Like the Washington Post reader, consumers want easily understood news to minimize the time and effort to understand deep information. From this perspective, suppliers and consumers share the complex news market dynamics of the 24-hour news cycle.

Speed promotes short-term thinking, quick conclusions, and impatience. These quality criteria are easily exploited by suppliers. There is no time for depth. And no one can keep up with the knowledge needed to comprehend topic after topic.

The 24-hour news cycle generates a flood of news. Something, anything, must fill the screens and airtime. More deviously, some newsmakers flood the news with the goal of keeping their consumers emotionally engaged and logically disengaged. Their antics come so fast that Masherg’s Law come into play even with one newsmaker alone, leaving consumers exhausted. Election campaigns come to mind.

Some news suppliers decrease quality by using sensational opinion content to gain consumer attention. They may not attract a large mainstream base but they do not need to. Technology enables them to exploit niche markets without concern for objective quality, driving higher quality mainstream suppliers to compete on huge volumes of sensationalism, [5] drowning out the rest.

Dishonesty

In his Nobel Prize paper, The Market for Lemons, Akerlof[6] shows “dishonest dealings tend to drive honest dealings out of the market.” He goes on to write, “The cost of dishonesty, therefore, lies not only in the amount by which the purchaser is cheated; the cost must also include the loss incurred from driving legitimate business out of existence.” Another cost externalized by suppliers and paid by consumers and society.

Dishonesty is limited when product or service quality can be verified. The seller knowing more than the buyer is a classic lemon market. It typically motivates sellers to know the quality so they can charge a higher price. But what if the seller cannot verify the quality of the product? What price can they charge? In both cases, the buyer may lose but may have no way of knowing. What is the impact of unknown loss because of dishonesty? Caveat emptor? Venditor (seller beware)? Lector (reader)? Auditor (listener)?

With Masherg’s Law, high quality information is like the needle in a haystack of misinformation.

Technology Makes Masherg’s Law Work

Classically, product price goes up or down to ensure market clearing. [7] With news, however, perceived price is zero and it does not change. Driven by technology, supply continues to grow beyond the simplest demand definition: what one person can consume in 24 hours. There is no market clearing at all.

This creates a powerful incentive for news suppliers to create products that match emotion, the simplest manipulator of all. Because objective high-quality news has higher costs — research, creation, production — than subjective lower quality news, Masherg’s Law applies and low-quality drives out high quality.

Consumers are not protected from bad information with other products. Generic drugs are a good example. A search for ‘buy ibuprofen 200mg’ showed Advil at Rite-Aid, $9.49 for 100 tablets and Costco generic, $10.99 for 1000 tablets.

Branding works so well that people will pay nearly 10x for a branded version of the same drug. Those consumers weigh brand image — guided opinion — over scientific fact, to great consumer cost. None of us have the time or knowledge to understand all that we consume.

These tangible products have market limits due to physical production and distribution constraints. News has no such limits. Technology enabled production information floods the market, driving Masherg’s Law, leaving consumers vulnerable and suppliers thriving.

This brings into question why suppliers survive by offering low quality information. The readiest answer is the lack of discrimination by inexperienced consumers, who may be either new to or disinterested in the dynamics of the information marketplace. Quality is difficult but price is easy to understand.

“I had decided to get a new TV so I followed the ads in the newspaper to get an idea of how much it would cost. I noticed that the prices fluctuated quite a bit from week to week. It occurred to me that the challenge to economics was not why the prices were sometimes low (i.e., during sales) but why they were ever high. Who would be so foolish as to buy when the price was high since everyone knew that the item would be on sale in a few weeks?

“But there must be such people, otherwise the stores would never find it profitable to charge a high price. Armed with this insight, I was able to generate a model of sales. In my model there were two kinds of consumers: informed consumers who read the ads and uninformed consumers who didn’t read the ads. The stores had sales in order to price discriminate between the informed and uninformed consumers.”[8]

In that powerful illustration, price is easy to find and easy to track. Yet with news price of zero, quality substitutes for price. When consumers cannot discriminate on quality there are more uninformed consumers and with the flood of bad information, Masherg’s Law drives market failure.

Personal Cost and Community Cost

We see a cost to the individual consumer who perceives a price of zero and cannot determine quality. We also see a cost to communities through a skewing of news to misinformation, with the economic and societal costs of confusion.

For society, the major societal cost of low quality is that it drives out high quality. In many cases, it is the brand that delivers the credible news, be it Johns Hopkins University, Edward R. Murrow, or the National Weather Service.

Low quality imitation versus high quality. Which is which?

News categories get diluted by low quality imitators — a loud voice on cable or anger on social media–causing individual cost and community cost of market failure. High quality news agencies and reporters get lost in the sheer volume of low-quality suppliers, competing for our limited attention.

Free market mechanisms, with transparent price and transparent quality driving market dynamics, have failed to govern the supply and demand of news. Suppliers, acting in their self-interests, have used low-cost technology to enable broad market failure only hinted at in the past[9] and now presented to consumers in full force.

It is no wonder we consume junk news. It is primarily what we’re fed. And we cannot tell the difference. Junk news is engaging and we actively consume products for which we pay nothing.

With Masherg’s Law, we drown in the flood of bad information and cannot find the good.