I would say that there’s a general issue in the modern day that I’ll call the “free market problem”.
The free market wants to give people what they want. If it does that, the people reward it and that reward money goes towards finding new and better ways to give people what they want.
The central problems with that are that what people want isn’t always the best thing for them (or at least not when delivered in unconstrained dosages), “enjoyment” is addictive - regardless of source, it doesn’t have to be food or drug nor sex, and this system has a positive feedback loop with a shortening cycle as technologies like data mining come into being.
Overall, this is a bigger problem than Fox. News media is not the only field where this problem is manifesting. And nor is it fair to say that Fox is the only problem child in the moment we live in and - whether that is true or not - it’s dangerous to say that it is the only problem child that can be produced or that the free market will only produce the issue on one side of the political spectrum.
In general, the solution to this sort of thing - I hate to say it - is government intervention. The tragedy of the commons, races to the bottom, etc. are all problems which are solved by government regulation, oversight, incentivisation plans, etc.
In terms of what that would look like, I would say that there’s a supply side solution that is problematic but would probably work and there are a variety of demand side solutions.
On the supply side, the solution would be to use government intervention to make the news media be less entertaining, better researched, more factual, and more nuanced.
The First Amendment rules a lot of possible options for “intervention” out, in the case of false and propagandic news. That I have been able to think of, it really only leaves incentivisation.
Whether it’s an ideal methodology or not, I don’t believe that there is any solution - other than hoping that some quirk of the free market will kick in and course correct on its own - other than to have the government offer sufficient quantities of free money to the media as a reward for being truthful, non-biased, and having done proper in-depth investigation as to be worthwhile as to offset the funds coming in from the free market.
I can detail how such a system would work that would resolve nearly all complaints with the general approach, if anyone is interested.
The demand side solutions - trying to reduce interest in false media - are generally going to be less direct. Or, at least, all of the ones that I have thought of are.
Possibly, education could help. If you teach kids when they’re young about how our diets are crap because of the free market problem, maybe they’ll be able to accomplish avoiding it. I don’t know. I do know that that’s an area where we’ve tried to deal with a free market problem through education, so the results of that will let us know for other things.
But even if that does work, it only works for future generations and it will take some doing to accomplish since there’s going to be a lot of pushback against teaching, in schools, that kids shouldn’t watch Fox. Not to mention, again, the First Amendment.
The more practical demand side solution (that I’ve thought of) is simply to make politics more boring. Too boring for people to be interested in it.
In general, that means fixing voting systems to encourage bland, uninteresting candidates rather than provocative and exciting ones, reducing the amount of government drama that can be or is made public (e.g. by making the inner goings ons of government secret), etc.
As addicts, that all sounds horrible of course.
Fundamentally, the free market has discovered that we love team sports and melodrama. Making politics boring is like telling people that you’re going to swap out their football games with golf. Your addiction will convince you that it’s bad, undemocratic, helping corruption, etc. to change our systems in any way that would help to make politics more boring.
Again, I can give recommendations, should anyone be interested.
In general, I recommend working along all paths. That way if one fails, you still have the other. I would work on both the demand and supply sides, even if we have to accept with each solution that you can’t make everyone happy.
Making people happy isn’t the goal here. In fact, removing a bit of happiness from the world is exactly the goal.
Congress decides just what and how FCC regulates, and it has changed over time. Most standards are technical. Few are content-based. I note that regulation of social media is a hot topic worldwide now. We’ll see how it proceeds.