15
include political elites here) actually make up their minds about most important issues.
The result is that successful elites do not rely on facts; the language of values dominates
the marketplace.
This reduced role for the press suggests a different standard of performance from that
applied by traditional theories. If people do not rely very heavily on facts to form
opinions, then the media should not be blamed for failing to provide them. And since
information is not the critical driver of opinion and policy preference, we should not look
to information as the proximate source of “market failures.” Instead, the metric to be used
becomes the extent to which the media encompass the full range of elite cues about a
threat. In other words, do the news media make it obvious to the audience that
Republicans feel this way but Democrats another? If so, the media have played their
essential role in the marketplace of values by helping citizens align their opinions with
their values, regardless of how far from ideal we might consider the information they
have provided.
Redefining Threat Inflation
Following the marketplace of ideas tradition, current work on threat inflation defines
the process in terms of elite manipulation of facts and the subsequent distortion of debate
upon which the public must form its opinions. Kaufmann, for example, offers this
definition of threat inflation: “Threat inflation, as opposed to ordinary conservatism, can
be defined as (1) claims that go beyond the range of ambiguity that disinterested experts
would credit as plausible; (2) a consistent pattern of worst-case assertions over a range of
factual issues that are logically unrelated or only weakly related – an unlikely output of
Convention