John Nichols

[Commentary] President Donald Trump’s chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, and the Trump-aligned majority on a commission is bent on clearing the way for precisely the sort of media monopoly that FDR and the small-“d” democrats of his time feared. Recently, the FCC voted 3-2 for a radical rewrite of media-ownership rules that will benefit corporate conglomerates, while diminishing the character and quality of the discourse in communities across the United States.

[Commentary] No act of the recklessly authoritarian Trump Administration poses a greater threat to democratic discourse than the now-announced plan to gut network neutrality rules. With newspapers dying, radio syndicated, broadcast television commercialized beyond relevance, and cable television mired in scandal and dead-end punditry, the internet is the essential tool for the communication of ideas and the mobilization of those who choose to resist the autocratic impulses of President Trump and his crony-capitalist cabal.

“Chairman Pai’s plan to gut the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules will devastate black communities,” said Rashad Robinson, the executive director of Color of Change, the civil rights group that played a vital role in securing the FCC’s embrace of genuine net neutrality in 2015. “Net neutrality is essential to protecting our free and open internet, which has been crucial to today’s fights for civil rights and equality.”

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has been an outspoken foe of network neutrality, the first amendment of the internet that guarantees the free flow of information without censorship or corporate favoritism. With President Trump’s backing, and that of a Congress whose Republican leaders never say no to telecom giants, Pai will have an FCC majority and plenty of leeway to go after net neutrality. Its “days are numbered,” he says.

Activists predict that he won’t stop there. Through formal actions by what will be a Republican-controlled FCC and by granting of waivers that allow corporations to get around cross-ownership and joint-sales rules that were designed to maintain competition in local television markets, the FCC could end up facilitating media mergers and monopolies at the national and local levels that will be devastating to competition and to the democratic discourse. At a time when the United States should be supercharging public and community media to prevent development of news deserts where the only “information” comes from partisan corporate outlets, Trump and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon are dusting off the playbooks of the 1990s. Schemes to weaken competition and diversity, to create one-size-fits-all “newsrooms,” to set-up digital fast lanes for subsidized content and slow lanes for democratic discourse—all were proposed back then.  “They’re coming for all of it,” Free Press president Craig Aaron says of the Trump administration’s agenda. “They’re coming for net neutrality. They’re coming for every protection for citizens and consumers. Our movements have to be bigger now. But if we could get four million for net neutrality under Obama, just imagine what we can get under Trump.”