Analysis

[Commentary] The controversy behind the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s $3.9 Billion cash and stock agreement to acquire 42 broadcast stations and other media assets from Tribune Media continues to swirl. If approved, the combined media entity will reach 72% of US households, a figure far beyond the 39% allowed by Congress. Adding fuel to the controversy is that far-right-leaning Sinclair Broadcasting only became compliant with the ‘39% Congressional rule’ when FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, an appointee of President Donald Trump, reinstated the UHF discount rule enabling Sinclair to count only half of its actual audience based on the premise that UHF has a weaker signal than the VHF band. The reality is that, since the move to digital TV, signal issues are a thing of the past, rendering the UHF rule obsolete. So, what’s going on here, and what does it tell us about the future of TV?

While many will try to take ideological sides on this issue, a fair debate begins with honest perspective. Below is a list calling out several false arguments and those groups exacerbated the problem.

• Anyone who tries to defend the re-instatement of the UHF Discount rule. The fact is that the rule was obsolete and brought back to cynically serve a political purpose.
• “The sky is falling!” The loudest critics claiming that Sinclair will have excessive market power, crush the competition, destroy democracy, and other hyperbole happen to be those organizations that are aggressively trying to preserve their own economic interests.
• Tribune executives. Rather than stand on principal, they remain silent about the deal because they stand to gain a lot of money should a successful merger happen. Sadly, many regular Tribune and Sinclair employees stand to lose their jobs, as overlaps and the labor-minimizing efficiencies become the norm.
• The American people. Largely oblivious to how this will impact their local news, US viewers could very well see their community, their nation, and their world through an extremist filter. It is this indifference that enables political officials to take advantage of the situation and skirt the rules to help their cause.
• FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioner Mike O’Reilly. Appointed to serve the best interests of the American people, they instead chose to rule in favor of a far-right political agenda.

Economic and political realities make it inevitable that the Sinclair-Tribune Merger will be approved. If the merger happens, short-term impacts will not be as dire as opponents predict. However, as time progresses, the lack of competition in local TV will inevitably lead to job loss, lower quality programming, and higher cost to consumers. The question that should be asked is this: Is Sinclair making a wise decision in investing in $3.9 billion in dying distribution model?

[Commentary] The Federal Trade Commission approved the merger between internet-giant Amazon and Whole Foods, the original organic grocer. You may be surprised how quickly the merger passed regulatory muster, especially given the public’s desire for strong antitrust enforcement to promote vigorous competition and equity in our economy, including our digital one. You may be wondering: Is this a case of weak enforcement? Is it proof that today’s antitrust doctrine is useless for digital-age companies? Or are critics of growing digital market concentration simply wrong to express concern? My guess is “none of the above.” Here’s why.

We hope the result in the Amazon-Whole Foods merger will neither make people give up on antitrust as an important policy tool, nor drive people to focus all their efforts on a “new antitrust” that tackles everything from quality jobs to social justice. We suggest that advocates strategically use antitrust enforcement and competition policy principles to fully protect consumers and citizens in the digital age. Finally, we strongly encourage a renewed effort to invigorate antitrust enforcement and promote new laws that create the social and economic equity we expect as a society -- and deserve.

Earlier in August, in its war against illegal robocalling campaigns the Federal Communications Commission proposed another hefty fine. That is, a fine of 82 million dollars. The target of the FCC’s wrath? Mr. Philip Roesel, who wasn’t just calling a la Adele style. Instead, Roesel is accused of both illegal robocalling in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and illegal spoofing, which the FCC claims violated the Truth in Caller ID Act of 2009 (TCIA). For his 21 million illegal robocalls, Roesel received merely a sternly worded citation from the FCC.

Following a recent trend, the FCC’s massive $82 million fine proposed against Roesel relied primarily on the TCIA’s prohibition against the transmission of misleading or inaccurate caller ID information, commonly referred to as spoofing, “with the intent to defraud, cause harm or wrongfully obtain anything of value.” What’s unique about this proposed fine is two-fold. First, the monetary value of the fine itself is one to write home about. Second, this fine is yet another instance where the TCIA has been used by the FCC to issue a penalty against illegal robocallers. It’s a trend that the FCC started not too long ago but is likely to continue into the future for several reasons.

[Commentary] Three days before Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, President Trump told Americans that most journalists are “bad people” who “don't like our country.” As the media covers the devastation in Houston and the surrounding area, however, even Breitbart News has begrudgingly acknowledged that the president's characterization might not be entirely fair, reporting that “journalists are helping to direct emergency crews to save stranded drivers rather than encouraging enraged mobs to riot against the police.”

In all seriousness, the response to the storm has showcased the best of elected officials, first responders, next-door neighbors and, yes, even reporters. The media's reputation is hardly the most important thing at stake in the midst of a natural disaster. But my job is to write about the press, and it is impossible not to view the work of reporters on the ground — disseminating vital information and relaying the stories of victims and heroes — against the backdrop of Trump's ceaseless campaign to undermine the media's credibility.

Beginning in 2013, the city of Opelika (AL) became the state’s first “Gig City,” offering broadband Internet services to its 11,000 households over a $43 million fiber-optic network constructed and operated by the city’s electric utility, Opelika Power Services (“OPS”). How is Opelika’s system doing financially?

According to Mayor Gary Fuller, the city’s network, in its fourth year of operation in 2016, is “on pace with our five-year plan to be at break even.” As explained in this perspective, this rosy assessment is entirely at odds with the city’s own books. The city’s telecommunications service has experienced large and continuing financial losses through 2016, accumulating millions in financial losses during its four years of operation. Before “break even,” these millions in losses must be recovered and the $42 million in debt paid. In this persepective, I conduct an analysis of the OPS broadband network’s financial health using the city’s financial statements. By any meaningful financial metric, OPS’s broadband network is unlikely ever to be “profitable.”

Americans clearly care about network neutrality, but to understand all that’s at stake, let’s take a closer look at what, exactly, “net neutrality” is and why it’s in the news. With so much at stake, millions of people are voicing their support for net neutrality and asking the Federal Communications Commission to keep the current rules in place. Anyone can submit comments through the FCC’s website until Aug. 30. The FCC could vote on a proposal by the end of the year, after which the battle may shift to the courts and Congress—so it is important to contact your elected officials and let them know you support net neutrality. The Trump administration’s effort to repeal net neutrality has created great uncertainty about the future of the internet, but one thing is certain: This fight won’t be over any time soon.

With a bundle of Senate confirmations of Trump appointees just before the August congressional recess, it’s a good time to take stock of what progress the Trump administration has made in filling the positions that shape policy in the digital arena. My Brookings paper last fall, Bridging The Internet-Cyber Gap: Digital Policy Lessons for the Next Administration, included a “digital plum book” that identified the positions from the full Plum Book (the Government Printing Office compilation of senior federal positions that is a roadmap to presidential appointments) with real impact on the constellation of issues that affect the digital economy and digital society.

To see how the Trump administration is doing, we used the digital plum book as a scorecard. There are 95 positions in the digital plum book. For 65 of these positions, the administration has at least announced a nominee, and 37 of these have been confirmed to date. This compares favorably to unfilled positions overall: the Partnership for Public Service counts 117 confirmed out of 591 positions, with another 106 pending nominations as of this writing. The digital plum book also identified 32 positions as jobs where a broad understanding of digital issues is critical to the mission. Of these, 13 have been filled and another two have been announced. For the remainder, 12 are being filled in an acting capacity, and the other five are vacant altogether.

[Commentary] As with so much about President Donald Trump, his Phoenix rally was two contradictory things: both shocking and completely predictable. Shocking because it was the most sustained attack any president has made on the news media. (“It’s time to expose the crooked-media deceptions and challenge the media for their role in fomenting divisions,” Trump ranted, as he charged that reporters invent sources and make up stories. “They are trying to take away our history and our heritage.”) And predictable because this is exactly what Trump does when he’s in trouble. He finds an enemy and punches as hard as he can.

The Campaign Legal Center and Issue One, two political “watchdog” organizations, filed Federal Communications Commission complaints against two Georgia TV stations, alleging violations of the rules that govern the documents that need to be placed into a station’s public inspection file regarding political “issue advertising".

FCC rules require that stations place into their public files information concerning any advertising dealing with controversial issues of public importance including the list of the sponsoring organization’s chief executive officers or directors. Section 315 of the Communications Act requires that, when those issues are “matters of national importance,” the station must put into their public file additional information similar to the information that they include in their file for candidate ads, including the specifics of the schedule for the ads including price information and an identification of the issue to which the ad is directed. The complaints allege that, while the stations included this additional information in their public file, the form that was in the public file stated that the sponsors of the ads did not consider the issues to be ads that addressed a matter of national importance, despite the fact that they addressed candidates involved in the recent highly contested election for an open Congressional seat in the Atlanta suburbs.

President Donald Trump stepped on stage in Phoenix (AZ) on Aug 22 with something clearly eating at him. Minutes into his style rally, we learned what: It wasn't the white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis who threw the nation into chaos and allegedly killed a woman in Virginia. Or the intractable 16-year war in Afghanistan that he just announced he's revving up. It's the media.

President Trump spent nearly a third — if not more— of his 90-minute rally rehashing his public remarks in the wake of Charlottesville and complaining that he was widely criticized for them. In fact, about the only time he mentioned the racial tensions and violence stirred up last week was in the context of defending himself. The president was so frustrated with media coverage of him that he printed out copies of some of the remarks he gave in the wake of the violence. He read them aloud to the crowd, pausing to express total disbelief that the tone of the coverage wasn't more positive.