Blogs

On July 11, 1934, Eugene O. Sykes became the first chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. He held the post until March 8, 1935 when Anning S. Prall rose to be chair. Since then, each succeeding FCC chair has been a man – that is, until May 20, 2013, when Mignon Clyburn became the Acting Chairwoman of the commission.

Telecommunications is a key element in some of the most headline-grabbing news of the week, especially the report from the Associated Press that the Justice Department secretly obtained telephone records of the news organization’s reporters and editors. But we want to highlight a development at the Federal Communications Commission that garnered almost no press at all.

The Federal Communications Commission is “increasingly caught up in a one-note narrative . . . of self-praise rather than focusing on providing the expertise and analytic agility necessary to adjust programs to provide bandwidth abundance to constituencies it is meant to serve.” Ouch.

It’s past time to set the record straight on Lifeline, the essential service to low-income families that has recently suffered fallacious attacks and been mislabeled as the “Obama Phone” program.

It’s a sad commentary on the state of our public discourse that clever misnaming of issues can totally recast what should be substantive policy discussions. The most obvious example: adding the suffix “gate” onto anything that smacks of real or alleged political wrong-doing in the wake of Richard Nixon’s Watergate is usually sufficient to muddy the waters beyond all reality; often it demolishes any chance for serious debate. Remember Billygate, NannyGate, CoinGate, CableGate and all the rest?

Last week’s Congressional oversight hearing on the Lifeline program vacillated between fact and fiction.

Thanks to efforts by Springwire and Consumer Action, more than 1,400 Americans who benefit from the program wrote to tell the committee how important Lifeline phone service is to low-income households.