Media Rent Seeking: The Unacknowledged Ugliness of the already ugly conflict between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.

There’s a concept in economics called “rent-seeking.” I’m simplifying massively (not being an expert in the subject), but essentially, it is exploiting what you have (or in most cases, have acquired) to make more money, without actually adding any value to it. American economist Robert Shiller’s example is a landowner installing a chain across a river that flows through their land and then hiring a collector to charge passing boats a fee to lower the chain. The…