Lots of people lie before regulators. Phone companies do it routinely. (Yes, if you do this for us we’ll bring fiber to every home.)
What we don’t expect, and what I can’t abide, is the regulators themselves lieing.
Apparently, the FCC has done just this, suppressing studies showing that media ownership means less diversity of opinion not once, but twice.
It was done to allow more media consolidation. You didn’t read about these spiked studies, in part, because of media consolidation.
The good news is that, thanks to the Internet, media consolidation is actually reversing. Not entirely, of course. Those who don’t use the Internet, who have their Internet access neutered by government, or who simply remain uncurious about the Internet, they don’t learn things which are on the Internet and their media (or politicians) choose to suppress.
Not directly.
But there is such a thing as "the grapevine." It’s the same news system
that tells you the preacher’s marriage is in trouble, or that the
schoolteacher’s son is gay, or you probably don’t want to follow Father
Pete into the vestibule.
Stories flow from the Internet into the grapevine, and they tend to
stick there. They move numbers in political campaigns, so we know they
stick there.
It’s just that if the regulators are going to lie about this, what else
are they going to lie about? And can we trust them about anything?
That kind of thing will take years to heal, even after the liars are gone.
