SHANNON LOVE: Let the FTC Regulate Where It Would Do Some Good:

If we’re going to regulate speech based on inducements to bias why stop with mere financial relationships? I think we should require all media sources to reveal all possible sources of bias starting with the political affiliations of the publishers and reporters. After all, the media sells stories they advertise as accurate and objective. Shouldn’t consumers have ready access to the information they need to decide if those claims are true?

Politics is more important than money. If you buy a toaster based on a biased recommendation, you’re only out the cost of a toaster. If you vote based on a biased political recommendation, you could lose your freedom. If the government has both the duty and the ability to protect you against bias in product recommendations on blogs, why doesn’t it have the same duty and ability to protect you against biased reporting on political matters?

Political beliefs matter. Soldiers fight and die for their political beliefs, not their paltry pay. Our political beliefs are closely tied to our moral sense of right and wrong and our sense of the just order of society. Political beliefs influence us on an unconscious level. Political beliefs do, without doubt, bias people even more strongly than money does.

This Wednesday, ABC is turning an entire day of news programing over to the Democrats’ health care plan. Wouldn’t viewers alter their judgment of the accuracy and objectivity of ABC’s reporting on the subject if they knew that the ABC employees donated to Democrats 80 times as much as they did to Republicans? Certainly, I can’t help but note that if the circumstances were reversed, most people who see nothing wrong in ABC’s actions now would suddenly see ABC’s donations as profoundly undermining the integrity of ABC’s reporting.

(For that matter, shouldn’t Deborah Yao have to reveal that she has an economic stake in suppressing blogs as competitors with traditional media?)

Revealing bias in matters of politics is even more important than revealing bias in commercial matters. If you buy a bad toaster on biased advice, you can easily tell because the toaster is crap and you can easily get another toaster. In politics, the media is often our only source of political information and we can’t easily tell which particular political policies are working and which are not. Worse, when we vote, we’re stuck with whomever we elect until the next election. For most political reporting, knowledge of the reporter’s bias is the only means of judging the accuracy and objectivity of a news story.

I’d like to put Jeffrey Immelt under oath on the relationship between NBC’s coverage and bailouts to G.E. . . . .