November 2016

TRUMP TRANSITION

WITH FCC SET TO GO GOP, WALDEN STILL BIG ON PROCESS REFORM
[SOURCE: Politico, AUTHOR: Alex Byers]
If you thought House Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) would drop his push for Federal Communications Commission process reforms once the GOP was in control at the agency, think again. Chairman Walden, who’s seeking the full House Commerce gavel in 2017, has been a big proponent of legislation to modernize FCC procedures. He helped steward bipartisan legislation that would’ve required the agency to study the idea of releasing texts of commission proposals before they are voted on. “My argument has been, I don’t care who’s heading up the commission, there's a flawed public policy process there,” said Chairman Walden. “So I hope with a new President and a new FCC, we can find common ground on process reform, because I think we can build out a much better FCC going forward that will serve the public interest better for the constituencies engaged.”
benton.org/headlines/fcc-set-go-gop-chairman-walden-still-big-process | Politico
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HOUSE COMMERCE COMMITTEE
[SOURCE: Politico, AUTHOR: Alex Byers]
A handful of House Commerce Committee legislators have had their names tossed around for posts in President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, meaning the panel’s Republican roster could look markedly different in 2017. Already, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) has been nominated to be CIA Director. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), a member of the transition team, has also been floated for a Cabinet gig, and Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH) has expressed interest in heading the Department of Veterans Affairs. Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) is advising President-elect Trump on energy policy, and if Energy secretary does not go to Trump pal and Oklahoma oil billionaire Harold Hamm, CEO of energy firm Continental Resources, Rep Cramer could be next in line. Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) is also on the transition team, and one never knows at this stage in the administration buildout what could happen. The potential for moves hasn’t gone unnoticed in Hill offices — especially for members who might have a shot to move up in seniority or grab a subcommittee gavel if other lawmakers depart. The new panel’s roster for the next Congress, which is also contingent on how many spots each party gets based on the size of the GOP’s House majority, will likely come out sometime in the next few weeks. After the 2014 election, the panel got six new Republicans; they were named in late November.
benton.org/headlines/house-commerce-lawmakers-floated-administration-chatter | Politico
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ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say

RUSIAN PROPAGANDA
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Craig Timberg]
The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation. Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia. Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.
benton.org/headlines/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say | Washington Post
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INTERNET/BROADBAND

FEELING ACCESS PAIN
[SOURCE: Benton Foundation, AUTHOR: Sharon Strover]
[Commentary] While we don’t usually think of cities as lacking broadband services, what they often lack is affordable broadband. Go to a local library in a city and you often see waiting lists for using their computers, or you see many people with their own devices using library-provided Wi-Fi. The New York Public Library program was prompted, in part, by a New York Mayor’s Office 2015 report noting that 36 percent of the city’s households with incomes below the poverty line lacked home Internet service. We know a lot of people have abandoned high priced cable or telephone company-provided Internet plans and just use their mobile phones to access the Internet, but those plans, too, are expensive and typically have data caps. The library patrons we spoke with were clever with work-arounds, but the bottom line was that not having an Internet connection that allows you to work with files, to work for longer periods of time, to work in a comfortable place where you can concentrate, impairs many routine activities. For kids in schools that assume students have easy Internet access, there is real jeopardy they will not be able to participate. Library-based hotspot programs may be a useful, if temporary, solution to access for people who lack the ability to subscribe to broadband services. Our work is ongoing. In addition to New York/Queens/Brooklyn Public Libraries, we are looking at some rural libraries in Kansas and Maine that are also lending hotspots. Affordability is a common refrain both in rural and urban regions. There are some other dynamics in rural areas that complicate the picture, and we will share some of those observations later on. But the fundamental questions have to do with the status of this essential infrastructure in America. Why do we have the highest prices around the world for gaining access? Why so much less high-capacity service (like fiber) compared to many other industrialized countries? What is the role for wireless services filling in where wired infrastructure is either unaffordable or unavailable? And where do libraries fit in our broadband plans?
[Sharon Strover is a Professor in Communication and former Chair of the Radio-TV-Film Department at the University of Texas where she now directs the Technology and Information Policy Institute.]
https://www.benton.org/blog/feeling-access-pains
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DEMS STILL COOL TO GOP’S NET NEUTRALITY BILL
[SOURCE: Politico, AUTHOR: Alex Byers]
Liberals are still scoffing at a GOP draft bill to implement network neutrality rules, even though it might be their best chance to maintain prohibitions against broadband providers blocking or slowing down internet traffic. … The stakes are high: If President-elect Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission repeals the agency’s rules, congressional Democrats may have to make a deal on net neutrality or risk losing the internet protections altogether. But any post-election reckoning with Republicans’ new grip on Washington so far has not softened their line on the Republican legislative offering. While Democrats say they’re open to the idea of legislating on net neutrality, several were not enthused about the idea. Instead, they focused on ways to delay or hamstring a potential repeal of the FCC’s Open Internet Order. Many are even hoping the issue is so far down on Trump’s priority list that he wouldn’t actually undo it, especially if he feels it would upset the populist voters who elected him. “If you said net neutrality to him right now, he wouldn't know what you were talking about,” Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA).
benton.org/headlines/democrats-still-cool-gop-network-neutrality-bill | Politico
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MAKING ACCESS TO BROADBAND A REALITY FOR LOW-INCOME AMERICANS
[SOURCE: AT&T, AUTHOR: Joan Marsh]
We are notifying the Federal Communications Commission that we are “opting-in” to the forbearance granted in the Commission’s 2016 Lifeline Modernization Order. By opting in to forbearance today, AT&T will not offer a Lifeline discount on our broadband products at this time except where we deploy broadband as part of a high-cost funded public interest commitment. Again, opting in to forbearance will still allow us to offer Lifeline-supported broadband in the future, should we choose to do so. We will continue to assess our options as the current Lifeline program reforms are implemented and further updates are adopted.
benton.org/headlines/making-access-broadband-reality-low-income-americans | AT&T
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SECURITY/PRIVACY

SECRET AGENDA OF A FACEBOOK QUIZ
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: McKenzie Funk]
[Commentary] For several years, a data firm eventually hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, has been using Facebook as a tool to build psychological profiles that represent some 230 million adult Americans. A spinoff of a British consulting company and sometime-defense contractor known for its counterterrorism “psy ops” work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seeding the social network with personality quizzes. Cambridge Analytica also gets a look at their personality scores and, thanks to Facebook, gains access to their profiles and real names. Cambridge Analytica worked on the “Leave” side of the Brexit campaign. In the United States it takes only Republicans as clients: Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) in the primaries, President-elect Donald Trump in the general election. Cambridge is reportedly backed by Robert Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire and a major Republican donor; a key board member is Stephen K. Bannon, the head of Breitbart News who became Trump’s campaign chairman and is set to be his chief strategist in the White House.
[McKenzie Funk, an Open Society fellow, is a founding member of the journalism cooperative Deca.]
benton.org/headlines/secret-agenda-facebook-quiz | New York Times
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ACCESSIBILITY

WHY BLIND AMERICANS ARE WORRIED ABOUT TRUMP’S TECH POLICY
[SOURCE: New Yorker, AUTHOR: Nicola Twilley]
The Federal Communications Commission’s self-imposed hiatus means that a number of high-profile regulations are unlikely to be acted upon until President-elect Trump takes office, if ever. One of those issues is video description – when a narrator explains, for the benefit of the blind or visually impaired, what’s happening onscreen during a TV show or movie, squeezing his or her voice-over into the gaps between dialogue. The problem is that not many shows have video description. Currently, FCC regulations require the four broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC) to provide just four hours of the service per week, for primetime or children’s programming. Five cable channels (USA, TNT, TBS, History, and Disney) are subject to the same requirement. A deleted agenda item from a November FCC meeting would have expanded the FCC’s requirement by more than half, up to nearly seven hours per week, and applied it to the top ten non-broadcast channels, including premium ones such as HBO and AMC. Today, the fear in the blind community is that a temporary delay might become a permanent halt.
benton.org/headlines/why-blind-americans-are-worried-about-trumps-tech-policy | New Yorker
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JOURNALISM

TOP JOURNALISTS WARN OF THREATS TO PRESS FREEDOM UNDER TRUMP
[SOURCE: CNNMoney, AUTHOR: Brain Stelter]
Some of the country's top journalists issued stark warnings about the importance of protecting First Amendment rights on Nov 22, two weeks after Donald Trump was elected president. "This year the threats to press freedom are quite close to home. It's right here," New Yorker editor David Remnick said at the Committee to Protect Journalists dinner. "I never in a million years thought I would be up here on stage appealing for the freedom and safety of American journalists at home," CNN's Christiane Amanpour said. Amanpour called on the journalists in attendance to "recommit to robust fact-based reporting" and to fight "against normalization of the unacceptable." President-elect Trump's attacks against the American media were a recurring theme during the annual dinner, which focuses on threats to journalists in repressive regimes. "We will hold the new administration's feet to the fire. And they should respect that, even if they don't welcome it," CNN president Jeff Zucker said.
benton.org/headlines/top-journalists-warn-threats-press-freedom-under-president-elect-trump | CNNMoney
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SPECTRUM AUCTION AND LOCAL MEDIA
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Christopher Daggett]
[Commentary] With the demand for wireless broadband growing, the Federal Communications Commission is auctioning off a big chunk of the public airwaves. Billions of dollars are likely to change hands, a windfall that could transform local media across the country. This broadband spectrum is now used by TV stations to broadcast their signals to the comparatively small number of customers who rely on antenna reception at a time when most people use cable, satellite or streaming services. The proceeds from these sales could produce enormous public benefits if they are used to build a 21st-century infrastructure for public interest media. For states, communities and universities holding licenses in play, the auction presents an important opportunity to invest in new ways to meet the information needs of the public. At least 54 public television stations in 18 states and the District of Columbia applied to participate in the auction, according to research by the nonprofit group Free Press. These include three stations in the Los Angeles market, a major outlet on Chicago’s South Side, and the public station at Howard University in Washington. Each could be worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Perhaps nowhere is there a better opportunity to take advantage of the auction than in New Jersey. The governor and State Legislature should create a permanent fund to support a new model for public-interest media, financed by a significant portion of any auction revenue. This approach could serve as a model for other states, universities and communities seeking to sell their spectrum.
[Daggett is the president and chief executive of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation]
benton.org/headlines/auction-could-transform-local-media | New York Times
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GOVERNMENT AND COMMUNICATIONS

TRUMP, TWITTER AND DISINFORMATION
[SOURCE: The Verge, AUTHOR: TC Sottek]
Donald Trump used Twitter to make outrageous claims during the entire 2016 election, and he’s still making them after winning the presidency. He is now turning Twitter into a state-media machine capable of quickly and widely spreading disinformation. In the middle of a rant about the Electoral College, President-elect Trump tweeted a preposterous claim: that millions of people voted illegally in the election he just won. (He also trashed democratic norms before the election, saying it would be rigged and that he would not accept the results if he lost.) President-elect Trump made the false claim about illegal voting in the middle of saying there should be no vote recount in Wisconsin. President-elect Trump has given no indication that he will restrain his careless speech or improve his standards for evidence. He has used Twitter to tweet and retweet false and misleading information at a volume that has challenged the bandwidth of fact checkers. In many cases the fact-checkers don’t get a word in before the false claim. When President-elect Trump becomes President, his Twitter account won’t just be the ramblings of a private citizen — it will be the remarks of the chief executive of the US government. And if his Twitter account is the most open part of his administration, the platform could effectively become the White House press office.
benton.org/headlines/trump-turning-twitter-state-disinformation-machine | Verge, The
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TRUMP VS PRESS CORP
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Ari Fleischer]
[Commentary] Outsider Donald Trump was elected president in significant part because of his promise to shake up Washington. He’ll soon find that one of the most entrenched forces that object to any change affecting them is the White House press corps. As recent meetings with the media showed, a clash is coming. The clash will go beyond ideology and the media’s dislike of President-elect Trump personally. It will happen because, while the press as an institution is largely in decline throughout the US, the White House briefing room is one of the mainstream media’s last bunkers of power. It’s a place where they dominate—satisfied with the traditions and practices that predate social media—even as the press struggles, especially financially, with how news is made and covered today. The briefing room itself, the place where reporters sit, and the adjacent space in which they are provided offices reflect the power of the mainstream press, based largely on the media-consuming habits of the American people from decades ago. The White House press secretary used to decide who got what seats, but this authority was given to the White House Correspondents Association in the middle of the George W. Bush administration. Nothing prohibits the incoming administration from taking it back. The valuable West Wing real estate occupied by the White House press corps isn’t the property of the press. It belongs to the US government.
[Fleischer was the White House press secretary for George W. Bush]
benton.org/headlines/trump-vs-white-house-press-corps | Wall Street Journal
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November 2016

Trump’s Next Battle: Keeping These Republican Senators Happy

How Will Lobbyists and Executives Navigate the Presidential Transition?

Trump’s ‘Art of the Deal’ goes to Washington

The tech industry and the search for a cancer cure

E-commerce won Black Friday weekend. Now Walmart really has to compete on Amazon’s turf.

November 28, 2016 (President-elect Trump and the Press)

Feeling Access Pains

Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say