A Note on Censorship

Gordon Tullock

American Political Science Review, 1968, vol. 62, issue 4, 1265-1267

Abstract: In Toward a Mathematics of Politics I presented a model of reciprocal interaction between information media and the opinions held by members of the community. It is the purpose of this note to apply a somewhat simplified version of this model to the specific problem of censorship. Testable hypotheses will be deduced and implications which may be of importance for policy will be suggested.Suppose the population of the country are arrayed on some issue dimension. It makes little difference for our present purposes what the dimension itself represents. It might, for example, indicate the degree of nudity of pictures of women in men's magazines or the strength with which the views of Castro are supported. Let us suppose that the distribution along this issue dimension declines at one, end, as shown in Figure 1. Note that the remainder of the distribution can be any shape; in fact, I have drawn in three dashed lines for three possible distributions. If we assume, not unreasonably, that most people who are in the business of producing public information seek to maximize readership, then we would anticipate that in a competitive market the information media would be spread over the possible positions in this line in much the same pattern as the population. Put more bluntly, the managers of such organizations as Time, Newsweek, and CBS go where the customers are.

Date: 1968
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