February 2017

Why no one wants to be the Trump White House communications director

[Commentary] If public relations pros don't want to be White House communications director maybe it's because President Donald Trump doesn't really want any of them to be White House communications director, either. The truth is, Trump would rather just do the job himself. Anyone who has witnessed Sean Spicer's first few weeks as White House press secretary might be reluctant to join the Trump media shop. But communications director is more of a behind-the-scenes role. It does not require the person who fills it to go through the gauntlet of the daily press briefing, which means you will not get mocked on "Saturday Night Live" and may be subject to fewer withering critiques from the President himself. The real problem is that it is hard to imagine any communications director feeling empowered to do what the gig typically entails: creating a strategic messaging plan for the White House.

It’s not impossible that Trump orchestrated the whole Gorsuch leak episode

[Commentary] Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch, criticized the chief executive's attacks on the federal judge who put his travel ban on hold. Judge Gorsuch reportedly called those attacks “disheartening” and “demoralizing.” On its face, this is a remarkable story. But dig a little deeper and the conspiracy theories begin to seem, well, not so conspiratorial.

Judge Gorsuch approved of Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) publicizing the comments; Gorsuch spokesman Ron Bonjean, an old Washington communications pro, confirmed quickly that Judge Gorsuch had used the words; and Kelly Ayotte, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire who is shepherding Gorsuch's nomination, confirmed the truth of the leak. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway seemed to suggest that the episode was an example of Trump's hands-off approach to his court and Cabinet picks. You can see why people might raise an eyebrow. After all, what better way for Judge Gorsuch to overcome Democratic senators' skepticism about him than to show some independence from President Trump? What better signal that he recognizes the clear separation between the executive branch and the judicial branch? Even if you don't believe in conspiracy theories, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better scenario to help establish Judge Gorsuch as his own man, not beholden to the President.

Cities and broadband, next administration edition

[Commentary] The federal government has often played a major role in the country’s infrastructure development. With a President who promised federal support for improving infrastructure, we will soon see how the new administration proposes to do so. Based on their approaches to markets broadly, the new administration’s broadband policies are likely to lead to significant deregulation, tax changes, and merger activity that will affect the private sector’s appetite for infrastructure-related investment.

Still, infrastructure deployment is largely dependent on the efforts and policies of cities. In the early part of the last century, cities were the gravitational center for efforts to create the electrical, water, sewer, transportation, and lighting infrastructure required for economic growth and social progress in that time. Subsequently, while telephone service was largely addressed at the state and federal level, cities dealt with the deployment of cable networks and the cellular towers. In the last decade cities have been at the cutting edge of creating a more hospitable environment for deploying gigabit capable networks.

[is the third in a trilogy of blogs discussing the state of broadband policy as a new administration and Congress begins.]

“Broadband death star bill” blown up by municipal Internet advocates

The "Virginia Broadband Deployment Act" that would have made it far more difficult for municipalities to offer Internet service has been dramatically watered down after running into heavy opposition. Instead of preventing cities and towns from offering broadband, a new version of the bill passed by the Virginia House this week merely imposes new record-keeping requirements.

The original bill favored by cable lobbyists (and called the "Broadband death star bill" by one opponent) would have prohibited municipal broadband deployments except in very limited circumstances. If it had passed, localities wouldn't have been allowed to offer Internet service if an existing network already provided 10Mbps download and 1Mbps upload speeds to 90 percent of potential customers. The bill also would have made it difficult for localities to offer lower rates than private ISPs. Gov Terry McAuliffe (D-VA) in Jan promised to veto the bill if it was passed by the state legislature. The proposal also drew opposition from local governments, broadband advocacy groups, and companies such as Google and Netflix. The opposition was successful, as House Republicans replaced the bill with another called the "Virginia Wireless Services Act" and approved it Tuesday by a 72-24 vote. It has now gone to the Senate for consideration.

FBI’s Top Lawyer Urges Congressional Action on Encryption

James Baker, the top lawyer at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, recommended that Congress take a more active role in legislating on US law enforcement’s limited access to encrypted data tied to a criminal investigation. “We don’t want this debate driven by some kind of catastrophe down the road,” Baker said. Baker, the FBI’s general counsel, appeared at an event to discuss a new encryption report issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The American people, through their elected representatives, have to make a value determination” regarding encryption, he said. “The world is moving forward, and doing nothing is an action, and will result in a particular state of affairs.” “I’m not sure that a commission is going to be able to come up with a kind of granular solution, [a] highly technical solution, promptly, that we can put in place to deal with this,” Baker said.

FCC Commissioner O'Rielly Letter to House on Agency Spectrum Fees

I write to commend [the House Communications Subcommittee] for the recent hearing to consider the reauthorization of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)...the Subcommittee should be applauded for exploring ways to expediate the repurposing of spectrum now solely or primarily allocated for federal government functions to commercial use. As the Subcommittee continues its review, I respectfully suggest that it look closely at the proposal to enact Agency Spectrum Fees as a means to improve government spectrum efficiency. Imposing a cost for spectrum holdings -- even if conservative or undervalued -- to federal agency annual budgets will serve as an appropriate and necessary stick to force agencies to retain bandwidth assignment only if absolutely necessary to further their particular missions.

FCC Finalizes Catalog of Reimbursement Expenses

The Commission delegated authority to the Media Bureau (Bureau) to, among other things, develop a catalog of eligible reimbursement expenses (Catalog) to facilitate the process of reimbursing eligible broadcasters and Multichannel Video Programming Distributors (MVPDs) from the $1.75 billion TV Broadcaster Relocation Fund (Fund). The Catalog is a non-exhaustive list, organized by category, of the equipment and services broadcasters and MVPDs are most likely to incur as a result of the 39-month post-incentive auction broadcast transition.

How Americans Encounter, Recall and Act Upon Digital News

Anyone who wants to understand today’s news environment faces a challenge: How to discern the nuances of digital news habits when Americans’ attention spans are fractured, human memory is naturally limited and news comes at them every which way. To tackle this complex question, Pew Research Center, in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, took on the unusual task of staying in touch with more than 2,000 U.S. adults who get at least some news online over the course of a week. The study also sheds light on whether people are actually aware of the sources of news they consume – a question all the more relevant in light of the prevalence of fabricated news stories during the final weeks of the 2016 election. It reveals that when consumers click on a link to get to news, they can often recall the news source’s name.

Individuals who said they followed a link to a news story were asked if they could write down the name of the news outlet they landed on.On average, they provided a name 56% of the time. But they were far more able to do so when that link came directly from a news organization – such as through an email or text alert from the news organization itself – than when it came from social media or an email or text from a friend. It was also the case that 10% of consumers, when asked to name the source of the news, wrote in “Facebook” as a specific news outlet.

‘Fake news’ has now lost all meaning

Once upon a time (like, three months ago), “fake news” had a precise meaning. It referred to total fabrications — made-up stories about Donald Trump suffering a heart attack or earning the pope's endorsement — and the phrase burst into the political lexicon as Facebook and Google vowed to clean up some of the garbage that had polluted the Internet during the presidential election. Since then, conservatives — led by President Trump — have hijacked the term and sought to redefine it as, basically, any reporting they don't like.

At the extreme end of absurdity, Trump actually asserted that “any negative polls are fake news.” All but Trump's most lemming-like followers will recognize the logical fallacy of such a statement. The risk that voters, on the whole, will accept the idea that “negative equals fake” is probably very low. More insidious is the notion that a report qualifies as fake news if it requires a correction. Such an overly broad definition unfairly attaches malicious intent to the kinds of mistakes that inevitably appear in good-faith journalism.

Net Neutrality Is FCC's Third Busiest Docket

To establish a baseline for a promised flood of network neutrality comments to the Federal Communications Commission, as of Feb 9, the proceeding was listed as the third most active proceeding in terms of comments with 178 comments in the past 30 days. Universal Service Fund comments and Lifeline subsidy compliance forms are the busiest dockets with over a thousand in each. At a press conference this week, Senate Democrats urged fans of the FCC's Title II-based Open Internet order to flood the FCC with new comments in support given that Republican chairman Ajit Pai is a strong opponent of that reclassification. The FCC received more than four million comments when the FCC was coming up with the last Open Internet order, a stat Democrats often cite in arguing that the rules have broad support and should not be rolled back.

Benton

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