The power of PJs: blogs & markets

Steven Horwitz makes the case for why both left-wing and right-wing ideologues should welcome the blogosphere. On the one hand, there is the people vs. the powerful aspect that many have discussed. What gets me particularly enthusiastic about the blogosphere, however, is that news, which had been largely the perview of a few big, central planners, is now increasingly dispersed and therefore behaving more and more as information does in a free market, rather than a planned economy. For anyone concerned about concentrations of power, whether governmental or corporate, this is a good thing. The merging of publishing and economics? Not quite yet, but perhaps journalism schools should be expanding their curricula. Here's the money quote from Horwitz:

The Hayekian lesson is that it is through the ability to enter the market and compete that knowledge gets created and made socially available to others. Just as in economic competition, where the process will tend to allocate resources better than alternative processes, so in the competition to produce news does the process tend to produce the best approximation to "truth." Markets are in that way examples of liberty defeating power. The very openness and competitiveness of markets makes any momentary hold on power tenuous, requiring that those who possess it continually act affirmatively (e.g. innovating, serving consumers well) to keep it. CBS and other Big Media simply have never had to face this sort of environment before and have become sloppy as a result.