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March 2017

Shepard Smith, the Fox News anchorman who drives the Fox News faithful crazy

Once again, Shepard Smith is doing cleanup on aisle Fox. Moments after President Donald Trump suggested that Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano had validated the unfounded claim that President Barack Obama had recruited British agents to bug Trump Tower during the campaign, Smith stepped in to say otherwise. “Fox News cannot confirm Judge Napolitano’s commentary,” said Smith, the network’s chief news anchor. “Fox News knows of no evidence of any kind that the now-president of the United States was surveilled at any time, in any way.” And perhaps to drive home the point, Smith added, “Full stop.” It was a rare bit of record-correcting for Fox, which enabled Napolitano to pass off his wiretapping thesis for several days before British officials complained that it was rubbish. (As a result of Napolitano’s faulty reporting, Fox pulled him from the air for an indefinite period this week.) And it was perhaps no coincidence that the correcting came from Smith, whose off-message comments about Trump have made him an apostate to the conservative Fox News orthodoxy.

Journalism cannot be neutral toward a threat to the conditions that make it possible.

Rush Limbaugh called government, academia, science, and media the “Four Corners of Deceit.” This is not just run-of-the-mill ranting. It expresses something profound about the worldview of conservative media and its audience, something the mainstream media has ignored, denied, or waved away for many years. In Limbaugh’s view, the core institutions and norms of American democracy have been irredeemably corrupted by an alien enemy. Their claims to transpartisan authority — authority that applies equally to all political factions and parties — are fraudulent. There are no transpartisan authorities; there is only zero-sum competition between tribes, the left and right. Two universes. One obvious implication of this view is that only one’s own tribe can be trusted.

Over time, this leads to what you might call tribal epistemology: Information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders. “Good for our side” and “true” begin to blur into one. Now tribal epistemology has found its way to the White House. President Donald Trump and his team represent an assault on almost every American institution — they make no secret of their desire to “deconstruct the administrative state” — but their hostility toward the media is unique in its intensity.

Could New York’s Plan to Erase Its Digital Divide Work for America?

New York is moving aggressively under Gov Andrew Cuomo’s (D-NY) “Broadband for All” initiative to connect all its residents by 2018.

New York’s efforts highlight the need for similar action on a national scale. Across the country, 12.6 million American households don’t have access to broadband (the Federal Communications Commission defines “broadband” as a download speed of 25 megabits per second and an upload speed of three megabits per second). Perhaps the bigger problem than expanding infrastructure, though, is the regular cost of an Internet plan. Internet access in America is much more expensive than it is in many other countries, and people with lower incomes are far less likely to be connected. Even New York’s initiative, which mandates that a 100-megabit-per-second connection be made available for $60 a month, is likely to mean that high-speed access remains functionally out of reach for many people. So while the blueprints for a more connected country may be laid before us, there remains a long way to go before the digital divide is closed.

Remarks at Workshop on "Public Diplomacy in a Post-Truth Society"

There has been much discussion in the media, academia, and within the US government about living in a “post-truth” or “post-factual” society and how to operate in it. Much was made of Oxford Dictionary’s decision to make “post-truth” the Word of the Year in 2016, an adjective they defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” While there is much that is accurate about this description, I would like to contest the view that we are living in a “post-truth” society — if by that we mean truth and facts no longer matter. Facts do exist. They are out there; we cannot operate without them. And they remain compelling when they are part of a larger truth-based narrative that is backed up by supporting actions. Crafting and effectively putting forth that narrative with foreign publics is the real challenge of Public Diplomacy today. Making sure “our actions match our words” is everyone’s challenge.

90 years later, the broadcast public interest standard remains ill-defined

The public interest standard has governed broadcast radio and television since Congress passed the Radio Act of 1927. However, decades of successive court cases and updated telecommunications laws have done little to clarify what falls into the public interest. The Radio Act gave local broadcasters monopolies over specific channels of electromagnetic spectrum to reduce interference on public airwaves. In exchange for control over a limited resource, the text of the law instructs broadcasters to operate in the “public interest, convenience, and necessity”. A recently released paper by Center for Technology Innovation Nonresident Senior Fellow Stuart N. Brotman outlines the legislative, judicial, and regulatory history of this public interest standard and offers some recommendations for how it might be reformed.

Google Fiber Community Impact Report

Through a variety of efforts, including programs focused on science, math, engineering and digital literacy, we’ve experienced amazing progress toward digital equity. Together with our local partners, we’ve seen:

  • Over 1 million people reached through the work of Digital Inclusion Fellows
  • 206,000 Children and families served by STEM-focused programs supported by Google Fiber
  • 115,000 Hours of digital literacy training
  • More than 1,910 Families living in public housing with access to no-cost Gigabit Internet
  • Over 200 Nonprofit partners and community organizations with free Gigabit Internet through our Community Connections program

Companies Aren’t off the Hook When It Comes to User Privacy

The Federal Communications Commission privacy guidelines would have put some of this control back in consumers’ hands: They required broadband providers to obtain opt-in consent from consumers to use and share sensitive information, and to allow users to opt out of the use and sharing of non-sensitive information, meaning the companies could use and share non-sensitive information until the consumer tells them otherwise.

Internet service provider lobbyists and the current FCC chairman have argued that these privacy regulations are unfair because they single out telecommunications companies, whereas “edge providers”—companies that run internet platforms and services like Google or Facebook—aren’t being regulated in the same way. Put differently, this argument basically says that companies like Google are already keeping records of users’ search history, so why can’t broadband providers also keep records of users’ browsing history? But this sort of “race to the bottom” mentality misses the point, and it’s harmful from a privacy standpoint. Both types of companies should be more explicit about their practices for handling user information, and both should give users control over how this information is used, regardless of whether it’s required. Users’ trust, not to mention their business, is on the line.

Fake News, Media Literacy, and the Role of Our Nation’s Schools

Fake news is simply the canary in the coal mine of a much larger systemic failure—the crumbling of an entire set of institutions in the face of seismic forces shaking our society. Our democracy itself is far shakier than most of us could ever have imagined. Teaching our students to read newspapers of record as part of teaching them to develop critical thinking skills is part of a long-term solution. But for the adults in the room, sending money and providing subscriptions will not substitute for sustained and immediate civic action on all our parts.

Obama civil rights head to run Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

Vanita Gupta, the Obama administration official who headed the Justice Department’s civil rights division, will become the first woman to run the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an umbrella organization founded 67 years ago that represents 200 national groups.

Gupta, 42, an Indian American lawyer, is also be the first child of immigrants to head the organization, which has been run for nearly 20 years by civil rights leader Wade Henderson. Gupta will take the reins of the Leadership Conference on June 1.

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