Bias exists in every public forum

The argument

The marketplace of ideas is, on its own terms, a claim about how arguments come to prevail: ideas are exchanged openly, and popularity is based on the value of the argument itself. Proponents of this position hold that the model fails at its first assumption, because it does not account for the bias that exists in all arenas where ideas are actually exchanged. The example offered is the political body. There the weight an argument carries is not settled by its content but by the allegiance of the person weighing it: party allegiance might determine how one chooses to vote, and does so before the merits of the case have been examined. What such a forum tests is therefore not the argument but the prior alignment of its audience. The point generalises, on this view, because there is no public forum without prior commitments of some kind among its participants, and no venue in which ideas meet each other stripped of the interests, loyalties and habits of the people who hold them. Bias on this account is not a defect that a better-designed forum could engineer away; it is a feature of any arena populated by people. That conclusion is stronger than a complaint about imperfect implementation. If the open exchange the model describes has never obtained anywhere, then the concept is too idealistic to be enacted in any society, and it does not exist as a describable institution. Supporters of the position draw a further consequence from the same premise: since nothing has ever functioned as such a marketplace, there is no precedent either way by which to judge whether it works, so any argument on the subject is pure conjecture rather than a finding. Because bias exists in every public forum, they conclude, the marketplace of ideas does not exist.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The prominence of the marketplace in US legal defence shows this is not the case. At its core, the marketplace of ideas is a question of censorship. That it has successfully been invoked hundreds of times to challenge censorship, is proof that it can and does exist. And, that the existence of bias, is irrelevant to its operation.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The argument states the marketplace in its idealised form and then treats any departure from it as non-existence. A marketplace that operates imperfectly is a marketplace operating imperfectly — which is the sibling position that it does not work, not the stronger claim that it does not exist. [Rejecting P2] Legislatures are one arena, and among the least marketlike of those usually cited. The standard examples are courts, journals, universities and open publishing, and the counter-argument points to the concept's repeated invocation in US free-speech litigation as evidence that something is operating under the name. [Rejecting P3] "There is no precedent either way, so any argument is conjecture" is self-defeating. It is itself an argument on the subject, and if it were sound it would forbid the conclusion the argument goes on to draw.