November 2015

The United States wants a global deal to reallocate parts of the radio spectrum for the next "5G" generation of mobile devices, a boom in civilian drones and a worldwide flight tracking system, senior US officials said. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said that world powers would have to decide whether to follow the US example in allocating more of their spectrum to mobile telephony. "The big question here is will the other countries of the world be participating in meeting that spectrum need in a way that produces scope and scale economies that allows the wonder of wireless and truly the transformative power that this represents to individual human beings, let alone to economies," he asked. The United States will start auctioning part of its VHF spectrum on March 29, 2016, and wants others to join in to reduce costs for global business.

Chairman Wheeler was speaking during the first week of the month-long World Radiocommunication Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, held every four years by the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union. Ambassador Decker Anstrom, head of the US delegation to the conference, said there were a "variety of views" among delegates on the issue, and on another debate about spectrum for civilian drones, which are expected to become an $80 billion business in the United States alone over the next decade.

But even though it is an incredibly exciting time to be a journalist, it is also an incredibly challenging time. In fact, I think the challenges to journalism now are deeper and more profound and more disturbing than also any time in our lifetime. And I’m going to talk about basically three big challenges: There’s the journalism safety, there’s the challenge of the shrinking of the freedom of speech space, and then there’s the rise of disinformation.

In the matter of the shrinking of the freedom of speech space, the thing that I’ve seen since I’ve been in government is so many of this rise of countries with autocratic leadership have realized that, in fact, you can shrink and narrow that freedom of speech space; that everything that we believed about the rise of the Internet, that it was like air and this incredible, never-ending supply of information -- countries are realizing that they can crack down on that. They can erect firewalls, they can pass criminal defamation laws, they can pass restrictive non-governmental organization laws. All of those things begin to restrict that freedom of speech space, which already is different than it is in the US. So my big boss President Barack Obama, as well as my day-to-day boss Secretary of State John Kerry, has made it very clear that supporting freedom of the press is a critical element of US foreign policy.

Since the widely panned Oct 28 GOP debate, there has been a lot of discussion over what sort of format and approach upcoming debates should take to best serve not only the candidates but more importantly, the voters. “It was deplorable on all counts. It was embarrassing really on the part of both the candidates, the Republican National Committee, which was involved in negotiating it, and some of the journalists,” said Newton Minow, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President John F. Kennedy. Minow has been called the father of televised presidential debates and he co-chaired the 1976 and 1980 US presidential debates. “The purpose of the debate is to educate the voters so that they can make intelligent decisions about who to support. In this case, it became a debate about the debates rather than a debate about the issues.”

Jim Warren, the national political writer for US News & World Report and chief media writer for the Poynter Institute, disagreed. “I don’t think it was anywhere near as bad as Newt suggests. I think it was very untidy," Warren said. "I think a lot of that stems from the fact that you have an impossible structural reality at this point of 10 -- count ‘em 10 guys -- who over two hours you expect to perhaps have a serious discussion of policy at the same time.”

[Commentary] In case we forgot, Donald Trump reminded us that he’s not exactly a big Politico fan. On SiriusXM’s “Breitbart News Daily,” the Republican presidential candidate called the political news site “one of the most dishonest organizations I’ve ever dealt with.” “It is not true what they write, generally,” Trump said. “I mean, they write some true stuff. … I can only tell you as pertains to Trump. I have had more false and dishonest articles from Politico than, I think, anybody else. And that’s saying something -- to the point where we don’t deal with them anymore.”

What irked him this time was an article by Kenneth P. Vogel and Ben Schreckinger that reported Trump previously (and quietly) courted mega-donors Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer and the Koch brothers -- conservative backers from whom Trump has publicly distanced himself, boasting that his personal wealth makes him unbeholden to outside interests, such as them. Trump said the report is untrue. The business mogul has made a habit of trolling Politico on Twitter in recent months -- with Politico and some of its writers trolling him right back, in some cases. Here's the thing about Trump's media feuds, though: They never last. Remember when he said he wouldn't appear on Fox News anymore? He was back on "The O'Reilly Factor" a week later. It's almost as if, when it comes to media outlets, Trump is a bit fickle.