Edward R. Murrow in the early days of television said:
"Television, this instrument can teach. It can illuminate. It can even inspire but it can do so only through the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends.
Otherwise, it is nothing but wires and in a box."

a new Fairness Doctrine: 

government regulation and intervention may be appropriate.

We are living in an unprecedented time with more information available at people's fingertips than any time in history but also with a cacophony and confusion that follows.

Only one private industry is mentioned in US Constitution and it's the Press. And I don't think it's by accident.
 I think that the Framers of the Constitution understood how central the Press is to

We're in a crisis right now when it comes to the private news industry.
Whatever the medium, whether it's print or broadcast or internet or cable, there is a devastating disruption and particularly the older forms are being disrupted by the internet generally, which doesn't view itself and its leaders do not think of themselves as journalists in the news industry and nonetheless,
they have built an AD Industry that draws away from conventional media the hard blood of the financial mechanism that supported broadcast news, cable news and print media.

The devastation has been so profound that over 50% of newspapers have reduced employment, many are closing and that's also true in Broadcast.

And it's not just the reduction of news, creating news deserts in many parts of the country where there's literally no local news.
It's also eliminating the lines between Opinion and Reporting Facts.

What I do think is very significant here is that the First Amendment has been conceived of throughout American history as important.
But only recently -- more as a barrier to government action.
In fact,  throughout American history, the United States government has been deeply involved in every aspect of the media, whether

 The biggest internet platform companies are giving full employment to cognitive psychologists and behavioral psychologists who are paid full time to find ways to exploit our confusion and our vulnerabilities to find ways to keep us engaged by making sure that the algorithms amplify what is most enraging, what is most upsetting, what is most divisive.

 That is not simply allowing us to pursue our own choices. That's exploitation.
And in this area and every area, the Government has obligations to protect consumers, to guard us from exploitation.
And it's that kind of Regulation that I call for enforcing laws that are currently on the books and strengthening the capacity to do so, so that there is not that kind of exploitation.

 section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. There's a half a dozen bills currently under consideration in congress.  But it's the Right wanting to use government power to force outlets to carry their messages

The courts (which have been such vindicators of the First Amendment values) ironically are now becoming barriers by using a kind of weaponized First Amendment to strike down the very rules that make the marketplace of ideas possible.
So just as an example in a recent opinion, the court of appeals for the fourth circuit struck down as unconstitutional a requirement of the disclosure of the source of political ads, even though within recent memory, the Supreme Court said, "One thing we know is constitutional is  -- required disclosure of the source of the ads."

We're on a collision course with sanity here and the First Amendment should not be a barrier to sane regulation and indeed to enabling people to monitor what we're being fed.

the government needs to mandate disclosure about where Misinformation is coming from and distinguish facts from opinion
And restrict section 230 immunity.

SOURCE       Martha Minow, Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech

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Fundamentally in Broadcast and Cable it has been the government that has organized the market and decided what kind of competition to have and what kind not to have.
So we've always had active and direct government engagement and I think this is not the time to stop.
This is the time to in fact, amplify that attention to make sure we have a rich and vibrant ecosystem, particularly of news.

 In that context, I identify two kinds of reforms.

1. One is to actually tackle the forces that are undermining the viability of private news industry and
2. the second is to support, amplify and sustain a variety of public interest news operations to profit, non profit and public media.

I do think that there's room to tax the internet companies.
I do think that there's room to even take the revenues from that tax and plow it back into reinvestment into News because actually, they are circulating news that is produced by News Organizations without paying for it.
 I'm sure that there's power to enforce the Intellectual Property laws and require payment for the circulation of material developed by others.

I do think that there's even room to develop a new Fairness Doctrine where the platform internet companies would not be censors but instead be sharers of varieties of viewpoints and news.

 And I, I'm sure that there's capacity and I hope that there's will to strengthen something like a public internet that creates alternatives and improve some marketplace of competition.
So I look forward to more conversation but that's the basic outline.