You’re right - section 3 very purposefully doesn’t set guidelines for what’s “fair” so you get many liberal outlets presenting just right-of-center as the opposing viewpoint.

In many ways it accelerated Limbaugh et al because viewers could see they weren’t getting an accurate conservative viewpoint in the mainstream and thus trusted it less, leading to other outlets.

We are all eventually in service to the truth. Misinformation can cause real damage. A surge of misinformation calls for more aggressive appeals to free speech to keep society stable.

What would have protected free speech in the first place? Not allowing the dangerous fantasies supplant fact.

Dangerous fantasies like “thalidomide is perfectly safe” or “smoking is good for your health”? How about “fat makes you fat”?

There’s plenty of statements that the mainstream media supported that were either flat out wrong and harmful to the American public. We’re still feeling the repercussions of a government hellbent against saturated fats.

At least allowing people to indulge in “dangerous fantasies” lets some of the people be right some of the time, instead of the entire monoculture being dangerously wrong.

Not all misinformation is the same, there's a difference between science got it wrong and society eventually corrected it self and being wrong on purpose or misleading to pander to an audience.

You are a wiser person than I if you can tell the difference while it's happening.

Maybe I am lol, but thats not important. I think it's fairly easy to differentiate people trying their best from bullshit peddlers. Look at the recent controversial topics vaccines, global warming, masks. Is it really unclear to see who is putting in a genuine effort?

I think personal biases (especially confirmation bias) usually end up interfering /strongly/ in these kinds of topics.

And “thalidomide causes birth defects” was no doubt “misinformation” early in the crisis as well.

You’d be suppressing that too.

"Dangerous fantasies" are a mixed bunch.

Once upon a time, emancipation of slaves or universal suffrage were dangerous fantasies. In China as of today, democratic ideas are a dangerous fantasy.

It is not as if contemporary West is the only society in history that has everything figured out and can only get worse through entertainment of "dangerous fantasies". To the watchers of status quo, every potential change is at least suspect, if not outright dangerous.

In America today, the dangerous fantasy is that voting is not safe, the election was stolen, and that we need an armed uprising to manage that.

So, do you think those ideas deserve to be held up next things like suffrage or the abolishing of slavery? Please, no.

A deeper problem is that many consider voting broken by definition, unless their team wins. Because the opposition has been "corrupted" and "fooled", their dissent is not legitimate. They see the ballot box strictly as a utilitarian tool, which when it does not give the God Given outcome, can rightly be followed up by the ammo box. Because the opposition is wrong and dangerous to this country.

In other words, people who wanted their bad faith arguments represented in a world of mostly good faith journalism got their way. "Mostly" because obviously there have always been journalists who were clearly disingenuous, but they took the hit to their reputation in kind. Reputation is barely a thing worth caring about anymore. Everyone takes a hit to their rep no matter what they say, so now they just focus on raking in advertising dollars.