After A Week Of Demonizing Regulations, Did Fox Have A Change Of Heart?

Last week, Fox launched a weeklong assault on government regulation called “Regulation Nation.” Coinciding with Republicans' recent push to focus on deregulation, it promised to “expose how excessive laws are drowning American businesses.” (Some of these job-killing regulations apparently include laws governing the minimum wage, worker safety and civil rights.)

So it was a bit jarring when Fox's Happening Now ran a segment today on conditions at fast-food play areas that pose health risks to children, including a lack of cleanliness and other unsafe conditions. The guest was Erin Carr-Jordan, a child psychologist and concerned mother who has made it her mission to spread awareness about these conditions and get them fixed. One of Carr-Jordan's primary concerns was that there are no regulations in place either in her home state of Arizona or on the federal level to mandate cleanliness for child play areas. Co-host Jenna Lee seemed to see her point:

CARR-JORDAN: [W]hen I reached out to the health department here in Arizona, I found out that there's no regulation in place at all at the state or the federal level, and then it became a mission when I found out that there were similar conditions in other parts of the country.

LEE: And that's really key, isn't it, to know that there's no regulations for cleanliness? Like, for example, if you went into a McDonald's bathroom. Do they have regulations for how they clean their kitchens and how they clean their bathrooms, and this is just somehow left out?

CARR-JORDAN: Right, that is absolutely the case. I think the big key here is that there's no regulation at the state or the federal level. I think that's the part that we need to change as parents and as people who care about children's health. That's the stuff that we want to bring to policymakers' attention. And yeah, there's absolutely regulation for the bathrooms and for the food areas. This is just something that slipped through the cracks.

Happening Now also put up a blog post about Carr-Jordan's efforts that promoted her website.

It's good to see Fox to give airtime to an activist who's trying to get a public health problem solved with the help of policymakers, but it's a bit confusing in light of Fox's constant messaging to its viewers last week that regulation is the enemy of a healthy economy.