August 2012

[Commentary] Aiming for gold, Team USA finished at a frustrating fifth place in men’s gymnastics after struggling in several routines. Morning news in the States was full of questions how that was even possible. But as I watched the analysis, I kept wondering: Which country got the gold medal? Fifteen minutes on CNN – no word on that. Focusing on the national team at the Olympics is the smart move in any country. That’s what viewers are most interested in. In Germany, everyone heard everything about the men’s gymnastics team seventh place performance. But journalists overseas don’t forget to mention the medalists who don’t come from their own country. So they learned that China won the event, followed by Japan and Great Britain. Watching NBC two nights in a row, I can hardly remember any coverage of a discipline that US athletes had no chance of winning. Sure, competitions promising a national medal come first – that is true for the US as well as Germany, where there's huge coverage of swimming, equestrian, or rowing. But stories do not just revolve around Germany’s athletes.

Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign is promising to become more media-friendly after headlines during the Republican candidate's weeklong foreign trip highlighted an increasingly fractious relationship with the press.

Fewer than 100 days out from the election, the campaign is expected to provide more press briefings and heightened access to the candidate in the coming days, and to make changes to the travel pool that will make it more media friendly. The changes would represent a major shift for the Romney campaign, which so far has offered only extremely limited access to the presumptive Republican nominee, and usually only to favored outlets like Fox News. A senior Romney aide said the campaign would work to find a balance between respecting the role of the press and telling the story it wants the public to hear about Romney.

Wireless industry officials are concerned about a new report from a White House advisory group that encourages companies to share spectrum. They argue it might shift the federal government's focus away from finding new chunks of spectrum that can be cleared for exclusive use by commercial wireless providers.

At an event sponsored by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a wireless industry official and top telecom staffer for the House Commerce Committee voiced concern with the focus on spectrum sharing in a new report issued earlier this month from the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. The report argues that it is too difficult, expensive and time consuming to try to move federal users off of their spectrum and that a better way to address both government and industry's spectrum needs in the short term is to find ways to share spectrum. "The new system for federal spectrum management that this report calls for--a new spectrum architecture and a corresponding shift in the architecture of future radio systems that use it--can multiply the effective capacity of spectrum by a factor of 1,000," according to the PCAST report on Realizing the Full Potential of Government-Held Spectrum to Spur Economic Growth. "The essential element of this new federal spectrum architecture is that the norm for spectrum use should be sharing, not exclusivity."

Chris Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs for the wireless industry group CTIA, noted that while the wireless industry agrees that sharing is one solution, it needs to be coupled with other approaches including identifying swaths of spectrum that can be cleared of federal or other users and re-purposed for use by the wireless industry. In addition, he argued that the report doesn't say how the federal government will reach President Obama's goal of freeing up 500 megahertz of spectrum over the next decade for wireless broadband users.

This view was echoed by House Commerce Committee counsel David Redl, who said the PCAST report fails to lay out a business case for spectrum sharing. "We're not sure there is economic viability to that model," Redl said.

A federal board tasked in the Senate’s cybersecurity bill with ensuring government agencies and tech companies don’t infringe on consumer privacy has been dormant and understaffed for years — and hasn’t had a nominee confirmed since 2007.

As members of Congress consider a new law that would help them exchange data about emerging digital threats, they’ve envisioned that the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board would make sure consumers aren’t harmed and that their data isn’t caught in the fray. But the PCLOB — created by Congress to protect citizens amid the post-Sept. 11 crackdown on terrorists — has long been paralyzed. It’s possible the Senate could confirm its nominees en bloc before the chamber enters the August recess, but the inaction so far has privacy advocates concerned that a cybersecurity bill could reach the President without a watchdog fully in place. If the confirmations continue to be stalled, “We’ll have information sharing but not the oversight,” said Peter Swire, an Ohio State University professor who served as chief counselor for privacy in the Clinton administration. “Depending on the bill, we might repeal privacy protections and have nothing in place to make up for that.”