May 2015

Fox News continued its crusade against the Reagan-era affordable telephone service program for low-income Americans, which the network derisively refers to as "Obamaphones," with a misleading segment suggesting that the program has "runaway costs" and traps low-income Americans in poverty.

On the May 29 edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Tucker Carlson and Fox Business host Charles Payne attacked the broadband proposal and claimed that the Lifeline telephone service system was "radically expanded" during the Obama Administration leading to so-called "runaway costs" and fraud. Payne, who tweeted prior to his appearance that the Lifeline program was tantamount to "further enslavement of the 'poor'," complained on-air that the subsidy was "yet another program that's going to make it really hard for people to get off the sofa" through "the transfer of wealth from the middle class to people of a little bit lower class." Finally, Payne insisted that the expansion of broadband access to low-income Americans delivers the message to "the people who are on the lower levels of the economic rung, we are actually saying to them 'you can't make it but we'll feather the nest a little bit more'":

[Commentary] America is seeing levels of inequality it hasn't experienced for a century. And if you believe some technologists, that can be addressed with gadgets. But does technology really address inequality? Over the last decade, I've looked hard for ways in which digital devices can help the world's poorest communities. What people got out of technology depended on what wealth, education, and social ties they already had. Technology is powerful, but its power depends on its human users. This is true as much in America as elsewhere.

How can it be that something that benefits so many of us could worsen inequality? The simple answer is that technology helps us in proportion to what we already have. That is to say, digital tools benefit the haves more than the have-nots; they don't add the same, fixed benefit for everyone. Technology is less a bridge, and more a jack -- it widens socio-economic gaps. Cheaper gadgets don't change the fact that rich, powerful people can always afford more. Smart tools don't overcome the advantage of the better-educated. Even when free, technologies don't dispel relative advantages. If inequality is the problem, we need something other than technological solutions.

[Kentaro Toyama is WK Kellogg Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information]

Let’s start with the fundamentals:

1. Endorsements must be truthful and not misleading.
2. If there’s a connection between an endorser and the marketer of the product that would affect how people evaluate the endorsement, disclose it clearly and conspicuously.
3. If the advertiser doesn’t have proof that an endorser’s experience represents what consumers will achieve by using the product, clearly and conspicuously disclose the generally expected results in those circumstances.

Sound familiar? It should, since those principles form the foundation of how the FTC Act applies to endorsements – and nothing has changed. So what will you find in the updated FAQs?

• We’ve expanded some topics we touched on the first time around
• We've taken a deeper dive into forms of promotion that were in their infancy when the Endorsement Guides were revised in 2009
• A staff take on how the principles of the Endorsement Guides apply to other issues that advertisers are thinking about – affiliate marketing, “like” buttons, employee endorsements, solicited endorsements, and uploaded videos, to name just a few.

Just months after enacting fiercely controversial network neutrality rules, the Federal Communications Commission is wading into a new political battle by unveiling a plan to subsidize Internet access for millions of poor Americans. House and Senate Republicans blasted the plan, warning that it would waste more federal money. The plan from FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler would expand the agency's Lifeline program, derisively referred to as the "Obamaphone" program by Republicans (despite the fact that it was created during the Reagan administration). Republicans argue that the $1.7 billion program, which currently only subsidizes phone service, has already been plagued by fraud and has been growing out of control.

"Why the FCC wants to expand this program before addressing the regular reports of ongoing fraud is beyond me," said Sen David Vitter (R-LA), a longtime critic of the program. "The FCC has failed to manage Lifeline efficiently in its current form, and I cannot support any expansion of a program that has so few safeguards in place to protect the legitimacy of the program and the American taxpayers who pay into it." FCC officials hoped that their plan might be able to win Republican support. While their plan would allow poor consumers to use Lifeline money towards their Internet bills, it wouldn't necessarily increase the overall size of the program, which is funded through fees on all phone bills.