Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, vowed to pare back outdated commission regulations, but declined to say if he will move quickly to overturn the Obama administration's landmark network neutrality rules. One top priority is "to remove unnecessary or counterproductive regulations from the books," Chairman Pai said after he chaired his first meeting.
[Commentary] In turning one of the most consequential decisions of the presidency into a primetime television event, and doing so before publicly sorting out the details of his latest executive order, President Donald Trump is governing in the way a television executive might, making moves that have the effect of controlling the narrative and driving ratings.
It's a familiar play for President Trump: During his presidential campaign, he made controversial statements or scheduled rallies to distract attention from his opponents. As president, however, Trump's big swings haven't moved the news cycle quite as much as they once did. Every major news organization covered Trump's Supreme Court tweet, but normally an impending nomination announcement would dominate the news; on Jan 30, it barely registered amid the cacophony of headlines and analysis surrounding the travel ban. At the Jan 30 White House press briefing, the majority of questions focused on the ban. There were only two about the forthcoming Supreme Court nominee.
Free Press delivered a letter to the Federal Communications Commission urging the agency’s new leadership to take serious strides toward closing the digital divide by making broadband more affordable. New FCC Chairman Ajit Pai recently claimed that closing the divide was going to be “one of his core priorities” during his tenure.
The Free Press letter commends Chairman Pai for this new focus, but strikes a note of caution given his prior track record as a commissioner. “No matter how laudable the new chairman’s sentiment may be, his proposals to close that divide could be ineffective — and even harmful,” Free Press warns. “The Commission must not subsidize build-out that is already occurring in the market, and yet not even address the primary structural barrier keeping tens of millions of people offline: affordability of the services already available to them.” ”Our research contains many similar findings that all point to the same conclusion: the root cause of the adoption gap is the lack of affordability, and that is an outcome created primarily by a market structure that produces too few affordable choices and suboptimal competition. The adoption gap is an affordability gap,” the Free Press letter reads. Pai’s preliminary plan focuses on giving significant tax breaks to the handful of ISPs that control the broadband-access marketplace. Pai proposes using taxpayer dollars to fund the construction of gigabit networks in below-average-income neighborhoods, despite the fact that most of these deployment projects are already underway. His plan does nothing to make these services affordable.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has removed business data services (BDS) price reform from its list of active proceedings on proposed rules, marking another sign of the new Republican-dominated leadership’s light-touch regulatory mentality. “The items could be put back on circulation following modifications,” said an FCC official, adding that action is “typical” when a new presidential administration takes office. While the commissioners could revise the BDS rules, if they do they would likely be radically different than what former-FCC Chairman Wheeler proposed. FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly also opposed the BDS proposal.
This is exactly the time that the public is looking to build trust with the media, fostering a productive dialogue that supports accurate coverage representative of diverse voices, and we are disappointed that the first FCC vote of 2017 deprives Americans of meaningful information about the scope of their community’s feedback. In allowing stations to eliminate the only publicly accessible means to understand how audiences across the country are responding to commercial broadcast coverage, the FCC does a tremendous disservice to all who seek to support journalism that fulfills the public interest obligation it holds.
We are very concerned that continuing the current practice of putting letters and emails from the public in a file has been deemed too burdensome a task in the face of the urgent need for media accountability. Contrary to arguments submitted by FCC commissioners and industry representatives, the use of social media to find or report issues is not an adequate replacement for viewing the full breadth of input to commercial broadcast stations that are often mailed or emailed. This insufficient reply is especially more concerning when a full third of Americans–disproportionately Latinos and other people of color, lower-income and rural Americans–lack home broadband to submit feedback or view the extent of concerns submitted by their neighbors online.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer fielded a question about the executive order temporarily barring entry into the United States of citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries. “He’s also made clear that it’s not a Muslim ban, it’s not a travel ban. It’s a vetting system to keep America safe,” said Spicer. Following up on Spicer’s protestations about the word “ban,” NBC News White House Correspondent Kristen Welker noted the tweet above: “He says it’s a ban.”
Alluding to the wonderful symbiosis and spirit of cooperation between the White House and its press corps, Spicer responded, “He’s using the words that the media’s using,” said Spicer in a tribute to the overwhelming power of the modern media. “But at the end of the day … it can’t be a ban if you’re letting a million people in.” Welker wasn’t going to accept that tripe. So she pointedly noted that the president had called it a ban. “Is he confused or are you confused?” she asked. “No, I’m not confused. I think that the words being used to describe it are derived from what the media is calling this. He has been very clear, it is ‘extreme vetting.'” Except for that tweet, which has been retweeted nearly 34,000 times and liked nearly 160,000 times. Perhaps Welker’s remarkable moment of accountability journalism can set to rest all that silly talk that the media shouldn’t pay much heed to Trump’s tweets. Or maybe media organizations should check with Spicer & Co. before characterizing Trump administration initiatives to avoid overly influencing the president of the United States. Because we don’t want to mess up their messaging.
Questioning a sitting president’s truthfulness and actually using the words “lie,” “lied,” or “lying” has often been relegated to the opinion pages, editorials, or put in quotation marks: Let somebody else suggest the chief executive is lying about Yalta, or Cuba, or Vietnam, or trading arms for hostages, or “no new taxes,” or sexual relations with that woman, or weapons of mass destruction. This is the stuff of standard journalistic fairness. The standard, however, is coming under pressure. Not just by the bombastic new president of the United States and his famous tendency to exaggerate, but by that president’s embrace of new-age publishing technology and his over-the-top disdain for journalism at a frenetic moment for the media industry.
Newsrooms have wrestled with how to characterize the misinformation Donald Trump spreads since the presidential campaign, when his eyebrow-raising statements tended more toward “pants on fire” than true, according to at least one fact-checking site. This challenge is only intensifying with Trump in the Oval Office, and backed by an administration eager to provide “alternative facts” when the actual facts don’t flatter the president.
President Donald Trump is breaking into prime time to reveal his Supreme Court nominee in the most Trumpian way possible — on live TV, with the biggest audience he can muster. Get ready for Feb 1 tweet about the ratings. NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox all confirmed that they will carry Trump's selection show live, in place of their regularly-scheduled programs. That means bumping "The Middle" on ABC, "New Girl" on Fox and a special about Super Bowl commercials on CBS.
Networks hate presidential prime-time addresses for one, obvious reason: money. The events can cost millions of dollars in lost advertising revenue. With a former reality TV star now in the Oval Office, broadcasters could be forced to choose between taking more losses than they have in the past and rejecting White House requests for air time. Speaking in prime time on just his 12th day in office, President Trump is already ahead of the pace of President Barack Obama, whose own, frequent addresses at the outset of his presidency irked the networks. The frequency with which Trump demands prime-time air — and the way the networks respond — will be worth monitoring.
When you call the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has primary responsibility for any investigations in Congress related to President Donald Trump, you get voicemail. Here’s what it says: “If you would like to provide information or make an inquiry relating to President Donald Trump, please press 1.” If you press 1, this is the message you receive: “Because of high call volume, we are unable to answer your call at this time.” If you leave your name, number and “any information you would like to provide,” the caller is promised their message will be “reviewed as soon as possible.” The caller is also told they can press 2 for “all other matters” or to speak with the staff of Chair Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). So far, Chaffetz’s committee says it is not planning to probe anything related to Trump as part of its oversight mandate, and despite Democratic pressure. But even if they wanted to, staffers could be overwhelmed by the feedback collected on the committee’s voicemail.
President Trump may have used the power of social media to make his way into the White House, but now social media networks are showing that muscle can work for his opposition, too. The real question, however, is whether this burgeoning new movement can avoid the fate of many so others kick-started by the power of social networks — only to find that it's much harder to make political change than to make a popular hashtag.
The very ability for movements to scale quickly is, in part, why they also can fall apart so quickly compared with traditional grass-roots campaigns. That highlights the crucial difference between old social campaigns and new ones. Scale, even in the form of a huge protest, does not equal success.
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