The question of who chooses, at least in a capitalist democracy, would be who stays around and prospers based on the 'votes' of people paying them (advertises, subscribers etc.). But I think the benefits of some basic regulations to keep sheer propagandistic and deliberate misinformation (take for example the vaccines connected to autism scare) from being distributed or broadcast has been proven. Today too some seem to feel balance is putting on two extreme positions, I don't see a balance of having on say one wind power will save us all character on to 'debate' one climate change denier when the actual scientific community (boringly, and non-ratings grabbingly) is actually 99 accredited people saying something is happening and one scientist paid by an oil company saying it isn't. In the sense that information is either representative of reality as much as it can be or deliberately leaves things out or exaggerates there can be some regulations. You could say libel lawsuits are a form of regulation but this is after the fact policing rather than preventative and also dependent on having the funds to prosecute something legally. Also a forest can't represent itself directly if something untrue had been said about it being in danger, just a group of people who find some value in the forest. We've seen regulations imposed to limit nuisance lawsuits availble to those with the money or lawers looking to make work.
There is certainly a place for opinion seperate from news, but we're talking about things being manipulative not as opinion but as fact. I understand that under previous FCC regulations certain infotainment type programs would not have been allowed, and the reducing of it's regulations by both major parties changed that. The FCC as an 'illimunati' is something I haven't heard of except that under Nixon I understand it was used to harass political enemies (and he also used the IRS that way which was unprecedented). Mostly people don't seem to think about the FCC much at all anymore, I can't remember the last time I saw one of it's messages on commercial U.S. tv stations while in Canada stations are required to run CRTC spots telling where people can send concerns about the station. Ideally there is a board including broadcasters deciding on the terms of regulation, with television and radio that meant broadcasting licenses not renewed if there were many violations and with print the ability to distribute by mail, but with the internet not included things have unraveled. Freedom or a free for all? Do you allow a car company to make and sell a dangerous if cheap sub-par vehicle and wait only to redress things afterward, or do you try to prevent that? I think it's fair to say that generally in many countries a need for a restoration of regulation of some kind has been proven without going overboard into a nanny state regulating to the nth degree violence in comic books or forbidden words ala Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. People have a right to real data. North Korea or communist China would be a couple of examples of places without that.
Even a game of baseball has some agreed to ground rules. Would say that if you 'de-regulated' it that then everyone would win, or that nobody could win?
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