Newspaper and magazine publishers could curate their content, as could the limited number of television and radio broadcasters. As cable television advanced, there were many more channels available to specialize and reach smaller audiences. The Internet and WWW exploded the information source space by orders of magnitude. For example, platforms such as YouTube receive hundreds of hours of video per minute. Tweets and Facebook updates must number in the hundreds of millions if not billions per day. Traditional media runs out of time (radio and television) or space (print media), but the Internet and WWW run out of neither. I hope that a thirst for verifiable or trustable facts will become a fashionable norm and part of the soluti

Okay, so flashback to the 1920s and the emergence of something called the public interest mandate, basically when radio was new, a ton of people wanted to broadcast the demand for space on the dial outstripped supply. So to narrow the field, the federal government says that any station using the public airwaves needs to serve the public interest. So what do they mean by the public interest? Yeah, right? It's like super vague, right? But the FCC clarified what it meant by public interest in the years following World War Two, They had seen how radio could be used to promote fascism in Europe, and they didn't want us radio stations to become propaganda outlets. And so in 1949, the FCC basically says to stations in order to serve the public, you need to give airtime to coverage of current events and you have to include multiple perspectives in your coverage. This is the basis of what comes to be known as the fairness doctrine.