Lauren Frayer

Austin city officials and community leaders have long sought to stem the growth of economic disparity by providing equal access to technology. For many years, such efforts have been known nationwide as bridging the digital divide, and they’ve largely sought to ensure all citizens have access to computers and the Internet. Recently, however, the issue has grown more nuanced and complex. Access to high-speed Internet is no longer the sole measure of whether citizenry has equal digital opportunity, as such access is now readily available via smartphones and other devices. As a result, the issue now seeks to address whether all populations have equitable access to things like tech training, high-speed Internet at home, and education that emphasizes the importance of going online to apply for jobs, finish homework, access better and more efficient medical care, and do the millions of other things enabled by the Web.

As such, the phrases "digital equity" and "digital inclusion" are now being used to frame the discussion. Digital equity is what cities want; digital inclusion is how they obtain it. Initiatives that fall under this umbrella still include old digital divide stuff like getting computers into low-income neighborhoods, but they also increasingly entail skills training, support programs and guarantees of meaningful Internet access. This semantic shift is making it easier for nonprofits and city programs to proliferate around the cause, said Angela Siefer, director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, the leading group in the matter. “The reason is because there are so many digital divides,” Siefer said. “You might close one divide, but there’s another that pops up tomorrow.”

As the big broadcast networks and ad buyers descend on Manhattan this week for the start of the annual advertising sales season known as upfronts, the Colbert-Fallon role reversal says everything you need to know about the political charge that’s shaking up the television world. The thinking the Spring 2016 was that people wanted a party-like-it’s-1999 late night experience, which Jimmy Fallon and James Corden offered and Stephen Colbert, then struggling in the ratings, presumably did not. Now, as Alexander Nazaryan wrote in the Newsweek piece on Fallon’s new standing, “Americans want rage.” Actually, it seems, a good subset of them want “woke.”

Officials in nearly 100 countries raced May 13 to contain one of the biggest cybersecurity attacks in recent history, as British doctors were forced to cancel operations, Chinese students were blocked from accessing their graduation theses, and passengers at train stations in Germany were greeted by hacked arrival and departure screens.

Companies and organizations around the world potentially faced substantial costs after hackers threatened to keep computers disabled unless victims paid $300 or more in ransom, the latest and most brazen in a type of cyberattack known as “ransomware.” The malware hit Britain’s beloved but creaky National Health Service particularly hard, causing widespread disruptions and interrupting medical procedures across hospitals in England and Scotland. The government said that 48 of the NHS’s 248 organizations were affected, but by Saturday evening all but six were back to normal. The attack was notable because it took advantage of a security flaw in Microsoft software found by the National Security Agency for its surveillance tool kit. Files detailing the capability were leaked online in April 2017, though after Microsoft, alerted by the NSA to the vulnerability, had sent updates to computers to patch the hole. Still, countless systems were left vulnerable, either because system administrators failed to apply the patch or because they used outdated software.

Throughout Donald Trump’s business career, some executives who came to work for him were taken aside by colleagues and warned to assume that their discussions with the boss were being recorded.

“There was never any sense with Donald of the phone being used for private conversation,” said John O’Donnell, who was president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in the 1980s. For O’Donnell and others who have had regular dealings with Trump through the years, there was something viscerally real about the threat implied by the president’s tweet Friday morning warning that fired FBI director James B. Comey “better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” “Talking on the phone with Donald was a public experience,” said O’Donnell, author of a book about his former boss, “Trumped: The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump.” “You never knew who else was listening.”

The firing of James Comey as director of the FBI has left the credibility of President Trump’s White House in tatters. The White House now appears to be an institution where truth struggles to keep up with events, led by a president capable at any moment of undercutting those who serve him.

This wasn’t the first time that the president’s spokespeople have been asked to explain the inexplicable or defend the indefensible. But what it showed is that this is far more than a problem with the White House communications team, which initially bore the brunt of criticism for offering what turned out to be an inaccurate description of how the president came to dismiss Comey. Whether the communications team is or isn’t fully in the loop is not the pertinent issue.

Instead, the responsibility for what has been one of the most explosive weeks of the Trump presidency begins at the top, with the president, whose statements and tweets regularly shatter whatever plans have been laid for the day or week. It includes Vice President Pence, who in an appearance on Capitol Hill quadrupled down on what turned out to be, at its most benign interpretation, an incomplete and therefore misleading description of how the decision was made. It includes White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who must try to bring discipline to White House operations in the face of a president with a practice of frustrating those efforts and who then blames others when things go bad.

The Trump administration has removed or tucked away a wide variety of information that until recently was provided to the public, limiting access, for instance, to disclosures about workplace violations, energy efficiency, and animal welfare abuses.

Some of the information relates to enforcement actions taken by federal agencies against companies and other employers. By lessening access, the administration is sheltering them from the kind of “naming and shaming” that federal officials previously used to influence company behavior, according to digital experts, activists and former Obama administration officials. The administration has also removed websites and other material supporting Obama-era policies that the White House no longer embraces.

“The President has made a commitment that his Administration will absolutely follow the law and disclose any information it is required to disclose,” said White House spokeswoman Kelly Love. The White House takes its ethics and conflict of interest rules seriously,” Love added, “and requires all employees to work closely with ethics counsel to ensure compliance. Per the President’s Executive Order, violators will be held accountable by the Department of Justice.”

But Norman Eisen, who served as President Barack Obama’s special counsel for ethics and government reform, said the changes have undermined the public’s ability to hold the federal government accountable. “The Trump administration seems determined to utilize a larger version of Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility to cover the entire administration,” said Eisen, now a fellow with the Brookings Institution’s governance studies program.

They are called “must-runs,” and they arrive every day at television stations owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group — short video segments that are centrally produced by the company. Station managers around the country are directed to work them into the broadcast over a period of 24 or 48 hours. Since November 2015, Sinclair has ordered its stations to run a daily segment from a “Terrorism Alert Desk” with updates on terrorism-related news around the world. During the election campaign last year, it sent out a package that suggested in part that voters should not support Hillary Clinton because the Democratic Party was historically pro-slavery. More recently, Sinclair asked stations to run a short segment in which Scott Livingston, the company’s vice president for news, accused the national news media of publishing “fake news stories.” As Sinclair prepares to expand its stable of local TV stations with a proposed acquisition of Tribune Media — which would add 42 stations to Sinclair’s 173 — advocacy groups have shown concern about the size and reach the combined company would have. Its stations would reach more than 70 percent of the nation’s households, including many of the largest markets. Critics of the deal also cite Sinclair’s willingness to use its stations to advance a mostly right-leaning agenda. That practice has stirred wariness among some of its journalists concerned about intrusive direction from headquarters.

During the same week that President Donald Trump fired the man in charge of the investigation into the Trump Administration’s ties to Russia, Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest owner of local television stations in the United States, agreed to buy Tribune Media for $3.9 billion. Sinclair is set to acquire Tribune Media’s 42 stations and a prized asset, WGN America, a basic cable and satellite television channel. With the deal, Sinclair will reach more than 70 percent of American households with stations in many major markets, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. The proposed deal was made possible by a deregulatory vote by the Federal Communications Commission last month. It seems as though the Trump Administration, by paving the way for increased media ownership consolidation, is granting this conservative-leaning station group owner greater influence over our civic discourse. This is a major development that could fly beneath the radar while our attention is drawn to the White House-induced crisis at the FBI.

With Tribune, Sinclair goes from a large collection of TV stations to a national broadcasting platform with ambitions that go far beyond those of the Big Four networks. And that larger footprint, Sinclair figures, will allow it to roll out game-changing innovations including ATSC 3.0, mobile datacasting and targeted interactive advertising. These all have the potential to remake the entire television broadcasting business into a force that can vigorously compete with online and mobile.

Top Democratic Reps are asking the White House to turn over any recordings of President Trump's conversations with fired FBI Director James Comey. "Under normal circumstances, we would not consider credible any claims that the White House may have taped conversations of meetings with the President," Judiciary Committee Ranking Member John Conyers (D-MI) and Oversight Committee Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) wrote in a letter to White House counsel Donald McGahn. "However, because of the many false statements made by White House officials this week, we are compelled to ask whether any such recordings do in fact exist. If so, we request copies of all recordings in possession of the White House regarding this matter."

House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff (D-CA) said, “If the President has ‘tapes’ of his conversations with Director Comey, it is because the president himself made them. For a President who baselessly accused his predecessor of illegally wiretapping him, that Mr. Trump would suggest that he, himself, may have engaged in such conduct is staggering. The president should immediately provide any such recordings to Congress or admit, once again, to have made a deliberately misleading — and in this case threatening — statement.”