On the second part, I agree it would be a step to far to punish political speak. It's interesting though you went there when the topic is the news media. News is not presented as a partisan product we are told it is objective. If it's presented as objective and it's not that is fraud.
A few things. First, you're inserting the word "product." Second, "Fraud" has a very specific legal definition, which differs depending on whether we're talking about state or federal law. That doesn't have anything to do with biased news media.
Third, I'm not aware of any requirement that for a thing to be treated as political speech in court, aka in the context of a first amendment issue, that it has to be deemed objectively neutral. In fact, there could be no such requirement because quite literally no person on Earth ever has, is, or ever will be objectively neutral. There is no such thing as objectively true things in political speech except for the report of a naked fact.
That gets me back to what I was saying earlier. If news media reports something as a naked fact and that fact is objectively false, aka, if Keith Olbermann says "Donald Trump participated in a bukkake video with me, on 10/12/14", then the media can be sued for libel/slander. But everything else is simply political speech regardless of whether or not the media outlet claims to be fair & balanced, objectively neutral, or whatever.
News reports are political speech.
It's only false
facts that are subject to suit.
You could not sue Olberman for saying "I think Trump is a big dumbass", for example. That's political speech, even if he says it on a show called "The truthiest truthful objective facts"
So that's the difference in treatment between facts in a news report and everything else in a news report. So what's the need for adding an agency?
There's no need for a government agency to try to impose additional punishments over it, any such punishments would almost certainly be unlawful as they would be content-based restrictions on political speech, and there is no need for government to try to impose duplicative punishments for libel/slander when we already have lawsuits for that.
The more I type, I also begin to wonder whether the statute enabling creature of such an agency would stand up if challenged. Seems pretty clear to me that its creation alone, without regard to any actions it might take, creates a real danger that free political speech will be chilled.
