Lauren Frayer

As Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price walked through a hallway May 9 in the West Virginia state capitol, veteran reporter Dan Heyman followed alongside him, holding up his phone to Sec Price while attempting to ask him a question. Heyman, a journalist with Public News Service, repeatedly asked the secretary whether domestic violence would be considered a preexisting condition under the Republican bill to overhaul the nation’s health care system, he said. “He didn’t say anything,” Heyman said later in a news conference. “So I persisted.” Then, an officer in the capitol pulled him aside, handcuffed him and arrested him.

Heyman was jailed on the charge of willful disruption of state government processes and was released later on $5,000 bail. Authorities said while Secret Service agents were providing security in the capitol for Sec Price and Kellyanne Conway, special counsel to the president, Heyman was “aggressively breaching” the agents to the point where they were “forced to remove him a couple of times from the area,” according to a criminal complaint. Heyman “was causing a disturbance by yelling questions at Ms. Conway and Secretary Price,” the complaint stated.

[Commentary] It's become clear in recent months that President Donald Trump’s growling at the national press has, in many ways, backfired. I’m excited about the press’s reinvigoration, too, but I’m also worried about President Trump’s anti-press words and deeds—and their trickle-down consequences for state and local journalists.

I contacted 16 editors or publishers of state and local newspapers in California, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas to ask if their papers had seen post-election bumps in subscriptions or readership. Their circulations range from 8,000 to 200,000 daily. Seven responded, and only one reported growth. The others didn’t know why they hadn’t seen growth or said their local focus might be to blame. I don’t want to lean too heavily on these results, which are anecdotal. But they only add to my concern that Trump’s anti-press antics will inspire unprecedented attempts to delegitimize the state and local press.

[Jonathan Peters is an attorney and an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Kansas]

Democrats and Republicans, who already tend to place their trust in different news sources and rely on different outlets for political news, now disagree more than ever on a fundamental issue of the news media’s role in society: whether news organizations’ criticism of political leaders primarily keeps them from doing things they shouldn’t – or keeps them from doing their job.

Today, in the early days of the Trump administration, roughly nine-in-ten Democrats (89%) say news media criticism keeps leaders in line (sometimes called the news media’s “watchdog role”), while only about four-in-ten Republicans (42%) say the same. That is a 47-percentage-point gap, which stands in sharp contrast to January-February 2016, when Americans were asked the same question. Then, in the midst of the presidential primary season, nearly the same share of Democrats (74%) and Republicans (77%) supported the watchdog role. This partisan split is found in other attitudes about the news media, though none in so dramatic a fashion as with the watchdog role. Compared with 2016, Democrats and Republicans are more divided on whether the press favors one side in its political coverage, on how much trust they have in national news media, and on how good a job national news organizations are doing in keeping them informed.

Thousands have posted comments on the Federal Communications Commission’s website in response to a proposed rollback of network neutrality internet protections, weighing in on whether and how to defend the open internet. But many others appeared to have a different point of view. “The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation,” read thousands of identical comments posted this week, seemingly by different concerned individuals. The comment goes on to give a vigorous defense of deregulation, calling the rules a “power grab” and saying the rollback represents “a positive step forward.” By midday May 9, the thread was inundated with versions of the comment. A search of the duplicated text found more than 58,000 results as of press time, with 17,000 of those posted in the last 24 hours alone.

The comments seem to be posted by different, real people, with addresses attached. But people contacted said they did not write the comments and have no idea where the posts came from. “That doesn’t even sound like verbiage I would use,” says Nancy Colombo of Connecticut, whose name and address appeared alongside the comment. “I have no idea where that came from,” says Lynn Vesely, whose Indiana address also appeared, and who was surprised to hear about the comment.

Ashbury Senior Computer Community Center (ACS3), a nonprofit inter-generational technology learning center in the heart of Cleveland (OH) helps those still living on the other side of the digital divide keep up. More than half of the participants in Ashbury’s programs have an annual household income below $15,000 with few options available to them to learn technology and get access to the internet on their own. Mobile Citizen’s partnership and much-needed affordable internet has been a key component in Ashbury’s ability to offer this new and innovative Services Call Center program.

Ashbury, together with Connect Your Community (CYC), recently launched a Services Call Center offering nonprofit customers basic services such as research design, survey creation, survey programming, survey administration, data analysis, data cleaning, data entry, focus group hosting, focus group moderation, evaluation and report writing. It doubles as a valuable workforce development opportunity for their 6,000 digital literacy program participants as call center associates are required to have to have digital literacy and other technology skills to be able to participate in the program.

Companies that do business online are missing out on billions in annual sales thanks to a bug that is keeping their systems incompatible with Internet domain names made of non-Latin characters. Fixing it could also bring another 17 million people who speak Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Indian languages online. Those are the conclusions of a new study by an industry-led group sponsored by the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization responsible for maintaining the list of valid Internet domain names.

The objective of the so-called Universal Acceptance Steering Group, which includes representatives from a number of Internet companies including Microsoft and GoDaddy, is to encourage software developers and service providers to update how their systems validate the string of characters to the right of the dot in a domain name or e-mail address—also called the top-level domain.

President Donald Trump's overhauled campaign website looks a lot like the original: the resident in a suit and red tie, embedded tweets pillorying #FakeNews, and “Make America Great Again” hats for sale in every color (plus camo, of course). But what really stands out is what’s missing: the entire archive of content published on the site prior to January.

The purge began May 8, after one White House reporter asked press secretary Sean Spicer why the campaign website still included references to the Muslim ban. That same day, during oral arguments in the federal appeals case over the Trump administration’s executive order barring travelers from six Muslim-majority countries, Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert King also pressed Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Wall about the site. Wall argued that the current ban doesn’t discriminate against people on religious grounds, but King insisted the press release contradicts that claim. “He has never repudiated what he said about the Muslim ban,” Judge King said of the president. “It is still on his website.” Within hours it was gone. Within a day, so was every other pesky press release that might someday prove incriminating.

FBI Director James B. Comey has been dismissed by the president, according to White House spokesman Sean Spicer - a startling move that officials said stemmed from a conclusion by Justice Department officials that he had mishandled the probe of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. Comey was fired as he is leading a counterintelligence investigation to determine whether associates of President Trump may have coordinated with Russia to meddle with the presidential election in 2016. That probe began quietly last July but has now become the subject of intense debate in Washington.

It is unclear how Comey’s dismissal will affect that investigation. “The president has accepted the recommendation of the Attorney General and the deputy Attorney General regarding the dismissal of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Spicer said.

The White House circulated negative press clippings on FBI Director James Comey minutes after announcing his firing May 9. The one-page sheet circulated by the White House contained four stories, most of them about Democrats criticizing Comey's decision to disclose developments in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server. One of the clips was a Wall Street Journal editorial calling for Comey’s resignation because “he has lost the trust of nearly everyone in Washington, along with every American who believes the FBI must maintain its reputation as a politically impartial federal agency.”

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has agreed to review a three-judge panel decision that left the Federal Trade Commission's authority to oversee edge-provider privacy in some circumstances very much in doubt, according to a copy of the court’s announcement of the new hearing. The court also said that in the interim that panel decision is not to be cited as precedent of the Ninth circuit. Such en banc review is unusual, but the decision had prompted a lot of attention given that potential online privacy gap.

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit, in overturning the FTC's action against AT&T for throttling the speeds of unlimited data customers, in 2016 ruled that the regulatory exemption that prevents the FTC from regulating common carriers is not confined to common carrier "activity" by an entity that has the status of a common carrier, but to noncommon carrier activity by that entity as well. That meant that if Verizon, a common carrier, bought Yahoo, an edge provider, the FTC could not enforce Yahoo! privacy policies, and the FCC could not either because it does not regulate edge providers, leaving a potential privacy gap.