Regulation

One commenter over at MyDD raises an interesting question about this blog regulation business - don't we want to know how our elections are being influenced, and by whom?

I think this argument will be a hurdle for the anti-regulation fight, but it isn't impossible to surmount. After all, there is a mechanism for monitoring campaign contributions, which are the principal influencers of elections, and that seems to work well enough, even if the rules regarding contributions are not perfect. The only other way that blogs influence elections is through their speech, which is pretty clearly more like a newspaper than a PAC. After all, blogs don't go around spending millions on ad buys, reaching into people's living rooms. No, they have to be navigated to, just as a newspaper has to be picked up. People make a conscious choice to consume the political speech of blogs, so it's obvious that the election-swaying effort is going on. I'm just not sure how that needs more regulation, then, than the LaRouche pamphlets I might pick up from a cultist.