On Fox News today, Shannon Bream has been reporting on the Federal Communications Commission’s plans to put government monitors in TV and radio newsrooms to assess their coverage of eight “critical information needs”, and “underserved populations”. (…) The state has no business determining which news stories have priorities over others, and certainly no business sending monitors into newsrooms to ensure compliance – because the essence of a functioning press is not what the state decrees the citizen has a “critical need” to know but what it doesn’t think he needs to know. Why should “Social Solutions International” get to determine “the critical information needs of the American public”? And why should the government get to enforce them?
