Patterns Of Misconduct

Paul Krugman
NYT

Via Charlie Stross, I see that the Murdoch empire has another scandal — this time involving misleading advertisers rather than readers, by inflating circulation numbers. Wow.

And yet we should have expected something like this to come to light.

My sense, after 11 years of punditizing, is that people are complicated, but gangs of people less so. Individuals are often mixed in their behavior: incorruptible politicians may cheat on their spouses, political scoundrels may have impeccable personal lives. But groups, like a politician’s inner circle or the management team of a media empire, tend to behave similarly on multiple fronts. If they lie and cheat routinely in one domain, they tend to do it in others as well.

In fact, that’s how I knew early on that the Bush gang was cooking up a fake case for invading Iraq. I knew that they routinely cooked up fake cases for their preferred economic policies; I could verify that by doing the math. And the way they were making the case for war sounded just the same as the way they made the case for cutting taxes on the rich, with an ever-changing rationale for an unvarying goal. At the time I got a lot of grief; people clutched their smelling salts and asked how dare I suggest that the president would mislead Americans on matters of national security. Well, you know how it turned out.

(More here.)