Not everything for which there is public demand is good; there are notable cases of such things being illegal.
Consider the case of election-day journalism here. There are laws against my talking politics with my neighbor while we are standing in line ("queued up") waiting to vote. Is that fair and reasonable? Yes, in principle--even tho it bans something we'd do without a moment's hesitation at most other times and places. It is part of the right to a secret ballot, and that is deemed important enough that it is supported despite the fact that it greatly enhances opportunity for fraud in the count. In order to get those early indications of election results journalists must intrude on that privacy. In his book (At Any Cost) on the 2000 election, Bill Sammon points out that the "scientifically selected" precincts from which journalism gets its early data are in practice simply those precincts from which they are able to thus intrude enough to get data.
So in the first instance our election-night reports are based on data the very collection of which is subject to moral/legal challenge. Laying that aside, there is the issue of influence involved. All voters west of the Eastern Time Zone are given reports from the Eastern Zone before the polls close, and I know no one who thinks that has no effect on the results. Democrats were furious, for example, when in 1980 Mr. Carter conceded to Mr. Reagan so early that it affected turnout for other candidates in the Pacific Time Zone.
Money is styled "the mother's milk of politics" in this country, and that money goes largely for broadcast advertising. It was expected in advance that the decision in Florida could easily tip the balance in the 2000 election, as it ultimately did. Just as a thought experiment, imagine that time is frozen just before journalism began announcing that "Gore has won Florida." Imagine that Jeb and GW Bush, knowing only what they knew then, suddenly had a few days to fundraise to buy off that erroneous call until the polls closed in the Pacific Zone. How much money would they have been able and willing to raise, assuming while we're at it that there are no limits on individual contributions?
Without that early and erroneous call of Florida for Gore, Bush would have won Florida in a (comparative) walk because of greater turnout in conservative precincts of Florida which are in the Central Time Zone. All Mr. Gore's fatuous challenges would have been mooted, and the decision would, ironically, have been known almost a month sooner without broadcast journalism than in fact was the case. Furthermore, although the in the actual event the final Electoral College result depended on Mr. Bush's winning Florida, he lost so many states by so little that we will never know if that would have been the case without broadcast journalism's pernicious effects on that election.
The erroneous call of Florida was only the most egregious case; there were "dogs that didn't bark" all over the electoral map. The delay between poll closing and the calling of a state for a candidate should have depended only on the margin of victory in that state and not on the identity of the winning candidate. But had that been true, voters in western states with open polls would have treated to the intelligence that Mr. Gore had lost, among other states, both his home state of Tennessee and Mr. Clinton's home state of Arkansas.
The record of broadcast journalism on election day 2000 is thus indefensible, and the question of whether the tendentiousness was malice or incompetence is moot. If the FCC cannot tell the difference it is incompetent to perform its stated mission; if it can and has not done so, it is worse than that. The bottom line is that the FCC's stated mission is unconstitutional, and should always have been seen to be so.