Irrational Economist_ Making Decisions in a Dangerous World - Erwann Michel-Kerjan [151]
15 Thomas Eisensee and David Strömberg, “News Droughts, News Floods, and U.S. Disaster Relief,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, no. 2 (May 2007): 693. See also David Strömberg and James M. Snyder, Jr., “The Media’s Influence on Public Policy Decisions,” in Roumeen Islam, ed., Information and Public Choice: From Media Markets to Policymaking (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2008), pp. 17-31.
16 Although television news broadcasts were introduced as early as the 1940s, technological limits placed significant constraints on the medium. Writes Phillip Kierstead: “Early television news broadcasts were crude. . . . Much of the newsfilm came from newsreel companies. . . . [T]here was no adequate recording medium for preserving television pictures other than the fuzzy and inadequate kinescopes. Still pictures were mounted on easels so that studio cameras could photograph them. Developing film for moving pictures and transporting it to New York usually meant that the film available for newscasts was outdated by the time of broadcast.” See Phillip Kierstead, “News, Network,” The Encyclopedia of Television (http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/N/htmlN/newsnetwork/newsnetwork.htm, accessed on February 28, 2009).
17 Kierstead, “News, Network”; Newton N. Minow (Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission), “Television and the Public Interest,” Address to National Association of Broadcasters, Washington, DC, May 9, 1961 (http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/newtonminow.htm, accessed on February 28, 2009).
18 Kierstead, “News, Network.”
19 Ralph B. Levering, “Kennedy, John F., and the Media,” in Stephen L. Vaughn, ed., Encyclopedia of American Journalism (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 243; “The History of Film, Television and Video,” online chronology (http://www.high-techproductions.com/historyoftelevision.htm, accessed on February 28, 2009).
20 See CBS News Video, “1964 Alaska Earthquake—This Week in History: A Look Back at the March 27, 1964, earthquake in Alaska” (http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=1439412n, accessed on February 28, 2009). The quoted passage is from Kunreuther, Recovery from Natural Disasters, p. 9.
21 David Moss and Mary Oey, “The Paranoid Style in the Study of American Politics,” in Edward Balleisen and David Moss, eds., Government and Markets: Toward a New Theory of Regulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). See also Alexander Dyck, David A. Moss, and Luigi Zingales, “Media Versus Special Interests,” NBER Working Paper Series, No. 14360, September 2008.
22 Regarding the “slow response to Hurricane Andrew,” for example, James F. Miskel maintains that “there is no doubt that dissatisfaction with the relief effort contributed to the victory of Bill Clinton, a Democrat, over the Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush” (Miskel, Disaster Response and Homeland Security: What Works, What Doesn’t [Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006], p. 86). Regarding President George W. Bush in 2005, Daniel Béland writes, “Unfortunately for the president and the Republican Party, ten months after the 2004 presidential election, public and media outcry over their slow response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans seriously tarnished their carefully built image as relentless national defenders. Although local and state officials shared the blame for that slow response, President Bush’s apparent indecision in the aftermath of this catastrophe eroded the credibility of an administration that already faced mounting criticism about American losses in Iraq” (Béland, States of Global Insecurity: Policy, Politics, and Society [New York: Worth Publishers, 2007], p. 102). President George W. Bush’s pollster and chief campaign strategist in 2004 was quoted in Vanity Fair as saying, “Katrina to me was the tipping point. The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American