Analysis

In addition to the elimination of the main studio rule, another media item is proposed for consideration at the Federal Communications Commission’s October 24 meeting. A draft Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) was released earlier this week proposing two changes in FCC requirements – neither change, in and of itself, offering any fundamental modifications of significant regulation, but both showing that this Commission is looking to eliminate bothersome burdens on broadcasters where those burdens are unnecessary in today’s media world or where they do not serve any real regulatory purpose. One change proposes to limit the requirement for TV stations to file Ancillary and Supplementary Revenue Reports to those stations that actually have such revenue, and the other proposing to eliminate the obligation of broadcasters to publish local public notice of significant application filings in a local newspaper.

[Commentary] Why does President Donald Trump talk endlessly about fake news? For the same reason he talks about voter fraud: to soothe his ego and hoodwink his supporters.

In a world where voter fraud threw the election and a nefarious news media make up stories to embarrass Trump, Trump is actually the popular, effective pick of the American people. That’s a much nicer thing to be than the broadly unpopular and at times fumbling leader of a country in which a majority of voters preferred someone else. The real question is whether Trump actually believes either of these claims. Does he actually believe that, somehow, millions of votes were cast illegally without any evidence of that emerging a year later? And, probably more important, does he actually believe that the news media make up reports? The main question: Who’s he trying to convince, his supporters or himself? And which of those options is more problematic for the country?

[Commentary] A president who once contended that nine unnamed sources in one report couldn't possibly be real is waking up to articles with source tallies that sometimes soar into double digits. For example, ProPublica said its Oct 4 report that Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were close to being charged with felony fraud in 2012 was “based on interviews with 20 sources familiar with the investigation, court records, and other public documents.” Trump can cry “fake news” all he wants, but the frequency and volume of leaks makes it difficult to sell the idea that reporters are simply making things up.

A sufficiently successful social platform is experienced, much like Uber, as a piece of infrastructure. Except, instead of wrapping its marketplace around a city’s roads, Facebook makes a new market around communication, media and civil society. This, from a founder’s perspective, is an electrifying outcome. But this cultural metastasis has led to a swift and less-than-discriminate backlash. Already, calls for regulating the largest internet platforms are growing louder while remaining tellingly vague. After all, what can a government realistically do about a problem like Facebook?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook to once more defend himself and his platform. Responding to a cavalierly-tweeted charge of anti-Trump bias from the President of the United States, Zuckerberg again repeated his claim that Facebook was “a platform for all ideas,” and that, contrary to unfolding public opinion, his company did much more to further democracy than to stifle it. These arguments rest on a simple equation: The amount of information that a population shares is directly proportional to the quality of its democracy. And, as a corollary: the more viewpoints that get exposed, the greater the collective empathy and understanding.

This is what’s missing from Zuckerberg’s math—the transmutation of information into common myth. We have more data then ever before, but when you put it all together, it doesn’t add up to much.

President Donald Trump again scrubbed his twitter account this week, deleting tweets supporting defeated Alabama Senate candidate Luther Strange. Does Trump have the right to hit the delete button?

Mentioning the public interest just once, the Federal Communications Commission adopted its 20th wireless competition report this week. As mandated by law, each year the FCC is tasked with reviewing the competitive market conditions with respect to commercial mobile services (voice, messaging and wireless broadband) including the number of competitors, an analysis of whether any competitors have a dominant share of the market, and a statement of whether additional providers or classes of providers would be likely to enhance competition. Each year, the headline-grabbing decision before the FCC is whether or not there is “effective competition.” This week, for the first time in eight years, the FCC concluded that there is “effective competition.”

The internet is global. So the approach to internet governance should be global as well, right? Not exactly.

The internet, as a network, is decentralized, which makes it inherently difficult to govern. It belongs to everyone, but is owned by nobody. This speaks to a question that’s been around for decades—one centered around how we might govern the technical aspects of the internet. Jovan Kurbalija, director of the DiploFoundation and head of the Geneva Internet Platform, spoke to these very issues at a New America event. “Global governance sounds logical, but when you really dig into the digital policy, you see that the impact of the internet is very local, given the social, economic, political, and cultural context,” Kurbalija said.

Technology products, services, and sites are now where we get our news, debate topics of the day, and encounter what seems like an increasingly scary world. And people do tend to shoot the messenger. While the benefits of AI, algorithmic content filtering, and consumer electronics are easily taken for granted, technopanic will be driven by fear-mongering reports, fiction, and grandstanding politicians looking for someone else to blame.

The truth is that Silicon Valley is a shiny engine of innovation–and a bit of a frat house. Technology can both save and threaten the world; above all, it’s having an ever-growing impact on everyone’s lives. To use an old Facebook phrase, the public’s relationship status has officially and permanently changed from “friends” to “it’s complicated.”

[Commentary] The truth is that there are very few things that each party won’t condemn when the other side does it but defend when their own side does it. But it’s the job of the press to sort out what’s meaningful from what isn’t. In the context of a campaign, both sides will toss any criticism of their opponent that’s handy up against the wall to see what sticks. And in that metaphor, the media is the wall. Something sticks when the individuals who make decisions at newspapers, television networks and other media outlets decide that the story in question deserves extended coverage. Kushner’s e-mails are probably going to get the appropriate level of attention — which is to say, about 1/1000th of the coverage Clinton’s e-mails got. The story will be around for a couple of days, it’ll be a little embarrassing for him, and then everyone will move on. Which is exactly what should have happened to the Clinton e-mail story, given everything we know now. It was at worst a misdemeanor, but it was treated by the media like the Crime of the Century.

The real lesson that the story of Kushner’s e-mails carries is about the media’s mistakes in 2016. We live with the consequences of those mistakes every day.