Regrettably, I have been fooled by manufactured news (“fake news”) on a couple of occasions. It can come at you from many different directions for many different reasons – Left, Right, Center, foreign entities, scam artists, and those in it for the thrill. Today’s digital media world is the equivalent of the frontier. It’s the wild west as Hollywood made the West out to be. This is not a call for government to police it, beyond clear instances of threats to safety, fraud, larceny, and acts of a similar sort. Government meddling produces way too many bad spin-offs.
The record of government regulation is a mixed bag. Many efforts to manage a market from the Civil Aeronautics Board of 1938 (Civil Aeronautics Authority Act of 1938) to Dodd-Frank of 2010 (Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act) has unnecessarily distorted entire industries and raised prices.
Two blasts from the past should make this abundantly clear. Remember the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)? Well, many millennials probably wouldn’t. It was abolished in 1995. It was captured by the very freight carrier interests it was regulating. Eventually, bye, bye was Congress’s response.
Remember the previously mentioned Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB)? Once again, our hipster millennials would be scratching their heads. The whole airline industry was part of its fiefdom. For the sake of “stability”, everything from ticket prices to the size of on-board sandwiches was determined in agency boardrooms. The whole gargantuan regulatory maze simply made air travel the province of the rich. Flying used to be a sign that you “made it”. The CAB beat the ICC to the grave when Congress gave the CAB’s air travel whiz-kids the boot in 1978.
Before we leverage “fake news” into the new “stability” excuse, think again. There’s no substitute for the web user to double-source – maybe triple – their information. Government won’t do anything but create an oligopoly and a “new normal” of higher fees as birthed by some mathematical flim-flammery.
RogerG