Timothy Karr

[Commentary] Over the last 25 years, daily newspapers have shed as many as 25,000 newsroom jobs. The United States has just under half the number of local newspaper journalists working today as it did in 1990. Jobs in local broadcast radio and television have suffered in similar ways as many owners have responded to a changing market by downsizing newsrooms and requiring the remaining reporters to cover more beats. There’s hope we can fix this before the next national election.

Right now we have a tremendous opportunity to ensure that both existing local newsrooms and startups have the money they need to do the reporting that supports civic life. In June the Federal Communications Commission began a long-awaited auction that will involve a major redistribution of the public airwaves. The FCC is urging broadcasters, including dozens of public television stations, to abandon their channels or move elsewhere on the dial to free up bandwidth for data-hungry users of mobile services like AT&T and Verizon. This is potentially the most important development for local news and information since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which helped establish NPR, PBS and their many local affiliates and programs.

[Timothy Karr is the senior director of strategy for Free Press]

[Commentary] One of President-elect Donald Trump’s top tech-policy advisers has a plan: Do away with the main agency that protects the rights of Internet users and media consumers in America. You heard that right. Mark Jamison, who President-elect Trump chose to help oversee the tech-policy transition team, thinks that getting rid of the Federal Communications Commission would be a good thing for this country. “Most of the original motivations for having an FCC have gone away,” Jamison wrote in Oct, claiming that a heavily consolidated media marketplace would discipline itself to benefit ordinary people. He’s dead wrong.

If President-elect Trump were the least bit sincere about his claims to “drain the swamp” of lobbyists and special-interest operatives, he couldn’t have done much worse than selecting Jamison and Jeffrey Eisenach. If he wants to make good on his pledge to block AT&T’s $107-billion acquisition of Time Warner — which he called “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few” — he’ll have to lock horns with these two big-media boosters.

[Commentary] For years a lineup of phone and cable industry spokespeople has called network neutrality “a solution in search of a problem.” In reality, many providers both in the US and abroad have a history of violating the principles of network neutrality -- and they plan to continue doing so in the future.

[Commentary] One of the most persistent lies told in Washington is the notion that common carriage is a heavy-handed regulation that transforms innovative businesses into antiquated, government-run utilities.

Any mention of restoring this time-tested principle to the Internet causes fits among phone and cable industry lobbyists. It's a debate now raging throughout the record number of comments filed at the Federal Communications Commission, which has put the issue of common carriage back "on the table" as it weighs new rules to protect network neutrality.

Actually, according to settled law, common carriage applies to any carrier that "holds itself out... to carry for all people indifferently." This makes common carriage "of substantial social value," Columbia University economist Eli Noam wrote in a 1994 paper in which he accurately predicted industry efforts to kill the standard.

"It extends free speech principles to privately owned carriers. It is an arrangement that promotes interconnection, encourages competition, assists universal service and reduces transaction costs."

[Karr is Senior Director of Strategy, Free Press]

[Commentary] To break the cycle of repression we must look more closely at the tools protesters and reporters use and ask whether they further the cause of freedom  --  or just make speakers more vulnerable.

These tools fall under four categories:

1. Devices: We must support policies that defend everyone's right to record while adopting better technologies and applications to protect devices from shutdown and surveillance.
2. Applications: To be more accountable and transparent to users, these platforms must allow a full public view of every decision to block content. And these sites should invite feedback from users as a check against abuses.
3. Networks: To protect networks we need laws that right the imbalance between privacy and national security. And we must restore Net Neutrality to give users full control of their online experience.
4. Audiences: Technology has turned reporting into a two-way conversation between journalists and the their audiences. While audiences -- or what journalism scholar Jay Rosen calls "the people formerly known as 'the audience'" -- aren't technically tools, they do play a very important role in this new-media feedback loop. And the loop works best only when everyone can participate via open and secure networks.

[Karr is Senior Director of Strategy, Free Press]