What the various codes of ethics and the inquiry are saying is that news gathering is a special activity which needs more than the defamation laws and the Trade Practices Act to regulate it. To do this absolutely would be impossible. This too would seem impractical. Particularly when anyone can start up a journal on the net for virtually nothing. It would also require limits on maximum individual shareholdings right across the industry to ensure that owners did not simply park their conflicts of interest in different corporate vehicles.
Regulation alone is likely to give an unwieldy and unsatisfactory result.
The real solution lies in choice. Faced with a number of points of view, the public is generally no less fallible than commissions of inquiry or regulators. The goings on at 2UE are only a major problem if there are no alternative sources of information. The real solution lies in choice. That means that the Government should have used the extra bandwidth supplied by digital to increase the number of licences.