ABSTRACT
Media news coverage is a marketplace. Those who participate in it behave no differently from farmers who come to town on Thursdays to sell their produce or brokers who work on Wall Street. Each is out to buy, sell, beg, barter, invest, or steal for his or her own defense or gain. There are known and accepted rules of behavior. The bargaining is intense. And the products vary from the sublime to the positively awful. There are laws of supply and demand, analyses of cost effectiveness, and disputes over practitioners' ethics. The only significant differences between the media news market and any other are the currencies and the commodities involved. In the media news marketplace, instead of soybeans, pork bellies, stocks, or money, information is the currency, and news reports are the product.
