Lauren Frayer

House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) suggested that Americans ignore information they see from the “liberal media.” In a brief speech on the House floor, Chairman Smith cited recent Gallup polling that found 55 percent of Americans think news reports are “often inaccurate.” The same poll also shows that 62 percent of Americans think the media favors a particular political party, an increase largely fueled by Republicans.

“Commonsense, reasonable Americans would do well to discount the liberal media since they don’t provide fair and objective information,” Chairman Smith said. He suggested that President Trump’s approval rating, which currently hovers around 40 percent, is historically low because of negative media coverage. He cited a report from the conservative Media Research Center that concluded coverage of President Trump by the three major broadcast networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — was 88 percent negative. “Is it any wonder that half of Americans disapprove of the job President Trump is doing? The real wonder is that it’s not greater given what the public hears and reads every day,” Chairman Smith said.

A panel of journalists voted April 25 to table a request from Breitbart News for permanent congressional press passes, apparently. The Standing Committee of Correspondents, made up up five reporters from traditional media outlets, also put off a vote to extend the right-leaning site's temporary passes, which expire on May 31. The panel reportedly expressed concerns about “more than one troubling aspect” in the information Breitbart provided. It had previously questioned the news outlet's connections to conservative donors and organizations. “The whole thing suggest to me that they’re just not ready for a credential” one panel member said, according to Politico's Hadas Gold.

The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties. And you’ve got company: If you’re a typical reader of Politico, chances are you’re a citizen of bubbleville, too. The “media bubble” trope might feel overused by critics of journalism who want to sneer at reporters who live in Brooklyn or California and don’t get the “real America” of southern Ohio or rural Kansas. But these numbers suggest it’s no exaggeration: Not only is the bubble real, but it’s more extreme than you might realize. And it’s driven by deep industry trends.

[Commentary] The larger problem with WikiTribune is this: Someone who is paid for doing journalistic work cannot be considered “equals” with someone who is unpaid. And promoting the idea that core journalistic work should be done for free, by volunteers, is harmful to professional journalism.

The difference between a professional and a hobbyist isn't always measurable in skill level, but it is quantifiable in time and other resources necessary to complete a job. This is especially true in journalism, where figuring out the answer to a question often requires stitching together several pieces of information from different sources—not just information sources but people who are willing to be questioned to clarify complicated ideas.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Pai brings with him a love of broadcasting, a love of small businesses, a love of Kansas, and so much more. His selection may prove the catalyst for the regulatory golden age of our nation’s broadcasters.

In the grand scheme, whether to jettison the FCC is not for any of us to ultimately decide. Hearty discussions are important and should continue to be had as they can inform policymakers, in this case Congress. But the hopes for any real fundamental restructuring of the agency’s duties – or even if it should exist – will require legislation, which has proven difficult to enact for many reasons. In the meantime, the agency can address many of its flaws on its own. Better protecting the airwaves would demonstrate our commitment to a key original obligation. Additionally, reorganizing the internal structure and removing unnecessary burdens on broadcasters would line up nicely with the policy goals of many of us at the Commission. In closing, let me suggest that the new Executive Branch and Legislative Branch provide you with a wonderful opportunity – use it wisely!

Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, the lone Democrat on the Federal Communications Commission, is skeptical of the idea floated by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to replace the agency's sweeping 2015 network neutrality rules with voluntary commitments from internet service providers not to block, throttle or prioritize web traffic. Commissioner Clyburn said she's worried in theory that a voluntary regime would give major Internet service providers like AT&T, Verizon, Charter and Comcast too much power. "You've heard me say this dozens of times, about the internet and broadband being one of the greatest equalizers of our time, and what it enables. And something that important, for a handful of entities saying this is how it's going to be done, I'm a little bit uncomfortable [with] that. I haven't seen anything, but just the promise of that makes me feel a little uncomfortable."

[Commentary] The network neutrality activists won a bigger victory than they ever expected when the Federal Communications Commission dropped the hammer of Title II telephone regulation onto the internet. It may therefore be useful to recount a little history as an inoculation against the coming fever. Here are some of the empty stories that led to Title II, which will likely be repeated in various forms in the coming months.

To change the nation’s bipartisan internet policy, the activists had to manufacture a story of US broadband failure. In service of the failed-broadband argument, the FCC in 2009 commissioned a report from Harvard’s Berkman Center on the state of US broadband. After withering critiques by eminent economists, Berkman excised some of the most egregious mistakes and issued an updated version, but the report was so compromised that the FCC quit citing the research. The false Netflix narrative: Perhaps no event over the past 15 years advanced the effort to regulate the internet as much as the supposed throttling of Netflix in the winter of 2013–14.

Net neutrality was never about anything so technical as “treating all bits equally” or anything so economic as protecting “innovation at the edge.” It was about gaining bureaucratic and political control of the digital economy – and thus, increasingly, because of the centrality of information networks, the physical economy, too. A rollback of this short-lived, unnecessary policy will thus ensure the internet’s continued upward trajectory.

[Swanson is president of Entropy Economics LLC]

Applying the difference-in-differences method to a broad measure of investment (thus accounting for the Federal Communications Commission's "virtuous circle" effects), the author estimates the investment effects in telecommunications following the introduction of Title II reclassification to the Net Neutrality debate. Using standard econometric methods, George finds sizable investment effects from reclassification.

Between 2011 and 2015 (the last year data are available), telecommunications investment differed from expectations by between 20% and 30%, or about $30 to $40 billion annually. Actual investment averaged $126 billion annually, a sizable expenditure, but the counterfactual analysis indicates the average investment over the five-year window would have been about $160 billion (or more) annually. That is, over the interval 2011 to 2015, another $150-$200 billion in additional investment would have been made "but for" Title II reclassification. Notably, Dr. Ford finds no decline in investment following the release of the FCC's "Four Principles" to promote an Open Internet in 2005, suggesting it is reclassification -- and not Net Neutrality principles -- that is reducing investment.

AT&T is being targeted with a lawsuit following accusations of broadband digital redlining. Attorney Daryl D. Parks (he represented the families of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown) of Florida law firm Parks & Crump and attorney Walter Madison from Akron (OH) are representing families in Cleveland (OH) who allege they have been "severely impacted" by a lack of connectivity and want a meeting with AT&T top brass to talk about it. They are threatening a lawsuit and Parks has written AT&T President Randall Stephenson asking for a meeting April 28 at the AT&T shareholders' meeting in Dallas (TX).

Parks said in the letter that the redlining was an invidious practice "copiously" documented by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance report that had irreparably injured his clients. AT&T is trying to get its Time Warner merger through the Department of Justice, an approval that could be complicated by such a suit. In fact, among the threshold Parks talks about in his letter is whether AT&T's behavior is "relevant to its FCC character qualifications or its DOJ competitive qualifications to complete its merger with Time Warner?"

Former White House ethics officials are accusing the State Department of violating ethics rules prohibiting “the use of public office for private gain” by publishing an article that promotes Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s private members-only club in Florida. The article, which tells the history of Mar-a-Lago and dubs it the “winter White House,” appeared on US embassy websites in the UK and Japan, among others. “This is a clear ethics violation—it should never have happened,” said Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under president George W. Bush and current vice president of ethics watchdog CREW, which is suing President Trump over alleged violations of the constitution. “This is the use of public office for private gain. You can’t be promoting Mar-a-Lago on state department websites—it’s a business; you pay to join it.”

Update: Hours after Painter and Eisen’s complaints, the State department took down the articles that had allegedly violated ethics rules. A State department official said, “The intention of the article was to inform the public about where the President has been hosting world leaders. We regret any misperception and have removed the post.”