Even our "equivalent", the Murdoch owned Sky News channel is nowhere near as bad as Fox news
Id worry that polarizing people would take no time at all.
They can decide that a person is not "fit and proper" to hold a broadcast license, but that's a fairly large hurdle to overcome (and it is, of course, judicially reviewable).
To be honest, this is how it should be. A presumption in favour of broadcasting, but with the ability to shut a broadcast down for repeated and/or egregious violations.
If you go to conservative forums, you'll find the same biased clips of CNN/MSNBC that portray those networks as heavily propagandized.
Fortunately there are some decent conservative leaning news sites, such as The Federalist and National Review, but Fox News does seem to dominate. Even though I often find myself disagreeing with what the leftier US news organisations say as opinion, they're much better at actually delivering facts and presenting differing opinions with useful context.
To be fair, we have the Daily Mail over here. It's not as bad a Fox generally, but it depends on the topic. The BBC does definitely have a left bias, but it's pretty mild and they're really good on informative content. We do have The Economist though, which is our jewel in the crown of news and opinion IMHO.
The bottom line is though I even can go to the Guardian web site, and I might think they're off the rails a bit and missing context. Some of their opinion pieces are ridiculous, but I can generally trust their factual information. I can't trust Fox or the Daily Mail on facts. That really worries me because a movement based on or informed with extensive misunderstanding of basic facts, or worse with a disregard for the truth, is doomed long term.
I mean these are the people who happily pushed and continue to push creationism because evolution (science) is a problem for them.
People are aghast today by how there’s a separate reality, but the human trials were done in public.
Creationism was the writing on the wall.
Lumping Fox in the same breath as both sides is not true.
The other side doesn’t include just “leftist” content, it includes the BBC, NYT, and apparently Jstor papers and Darwin.
Fox also actively prevents content that undoes its narratives. They argument is that “the other side does it.”
There’s no doubt that there is motivated reasoning and bad arguments in the normal news.
But Fox uses that as an excuse to give up altogether and just double down.
America is where it is because Fox News paved the way. You couldn’t give them enough credit for what they achieved.