Blogger Shannon Love argues a point about media transparency and bias disclosure that I’ve been making for years:

Obama’s Federal Trade Commission have decided to regulate blogs based on the premise that undisclosed financial relationships between bloggers and businesses could lead bloggers to deceive their readers as to the value of products they blog about. [h/t Instapundit]

If we’re going to regulate speech based on inducements to bias why stop with mere financial relationships? I think we should require all media sources to reveal all possible sources of bias starting with the political affiliations of the publishers and reporters. After all, the media sells stories they advertise as accurate and objective. Shouldn’t consumers have ready access to the information they need to decide if those claims are true?

Politics is more important than money. If you buy a toaster based on a biased recommendation, you’re only out the cost of a toaster. If you vote based on a biased political recommendation, you could lose your freedom. If the government has both the duty and the ability to protect you against bias in product recommendations on blogs, why doesn’t it have the same duty and ability to protect you against biased reporting on political matters?

Political beliefs matter. Soldiers fight and die for their political beliefs, not their paltry pay. Our political beliefs are closely tied to our moral sense of right and wrong and our sense of the just order of society. Political beliefs influence us on an unconscious level. Political beliefs do, without doubt, bias people even more strongly than money does.

This Wednesday, ABC is turning an entire day of news programing over to the Democrats’ health care plan. Wouldn’t viewers alter their judgment of the accuracy and objectivity of ABC’s reporting on the subject if they knew that the ABC employees donated to Democrats 80 times as much as they did to Republicans? Certainly, I can’t help but note that if the circumstances were reversed, most people who see nothing wrong in ABC’s actions now would suddenly see ABC’s donations as profoundly undermining the integrity of ABC’s reporting.

I’m not arguing for the government to mandate such disclosure, merely that if the government is going to be in the business of forcing disclosures of some types of information—which is what the Obama Administration is pushing—why not be consistent and thorough about it?

(Of course, I think we already know the answer, considering the “80 times” figure cited above.)