I think people who read about events rather than participate in them are prone to wanting them regulated and controlled. If you read (or watch or hear about) any industry or activity, what will be reported will be what is going wrong. So you will just naturally want to make some kind of rule or set up some kind of consequence about that, so you can have done with it and move on. Kids singing in the halls? Thai immigrants being snubbed? Hot dogs too long for the buns?
More seriously, when NPR or the NYT, or even more conservative outlets like (I've heard) Fox News or WSJ, run a front page story about an industry, it's because someone cheated, or lost money, or broke laws, or fired a lot of people, or poisoned the wells or something. If that's what you read, that's what you will think the world is, and you will want to fix it in similar ways each time: make a rule so that Bernie Madoff or Google or the State of Indiana can't do that anymore.
The attitude comes from sampling current events without depth. Seeking information in a certain way or receiving it in a certain way - via front page, or news hour, or other "selected bursts," may make one tend rather automatically to favor government intervention. The medium is the message.
