Editorial

[Commentary] It should be among the easier tasks of a cabinet member to affirm, without hesitation, that the president he or she serves represents the values of the American people. But that was more than Secretary of State Rex Tillerson could muster during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” Asked by Chris Wallace whether President Trump’s morally vacuous response to the racist march and deadly violence in Charlottesville (VA) made his job harder, Mr. Tillerson said, “I don’t believe anyone doubts the American people’s values or the commitment of the American government or the government’s agencies to advancing those values and defending those values.” “And the president’s values?” Mr. Wallace asked. Mr. Tillerson replied, “The president speaks for himself, Chris.” Coming from the man the president picked to represent the nation around the world, it was a stunning admission, devastating in its simplicity and painful in its accuracy.

[Commentary] Major telecommunications companies, like AT&T and Comcast, control the underlying network that powers the internet. Websites like Facebook and Twitter provide a powerful service on top of that network. But if those websites start censoring conversations or booting users, there's always room for a competing upstart. Don't like Google? Try Bing. However, because they control internet service itself, telecommunications have the ability to shut down the upstarts. It would be as if a power company could charge people more, or deny electricity service, based on its own arbitrary standards. Don't like it? You probably don't have much choice. Nearly half of all US households have only one option for wired broadband service.

In the 21st century, internet access has become another must-have utility. It should be regulated like one. Companies like Cloudfare can choose their users - that option shouldn't be available to Comcast or AT&T. The likes of Prince, Zuckerberg and Bezos need to have a public conversation about the role they play in fighting hate groups and protecting freedom of expression. Telecoms, on the other hand, just have to ensure the internet works.

[Commentary] I found that most of Sinclair’s news-producing stations were as mainstream as the Mississippi River. And if you believe that mainstream is synonymous with liberal (I don’t), then Sinclair will be, upon closing of the Tribune deal, the nation’s leading purveyor of liberal news and views in broadcast television. In my diligent research, I found many damning news reports about President Donald Trump, his populist agenda and his apparent collusion with the Russians during the campaign. On top of that, I found biting satire aimed at Trump and the GOP leadership just about every day in late night and heaps of scripted entertainment programming that make a mockery of traditional family values. Many of these stations, I would note, are not in blue states where the out-of-touch elites dwell, but in solidly red states that generally back Republicans and supply Trump with his he-can-do-no-wrong supporters.

I believe that Sinclair’s national news is much more conservative than the networks’ are liberal. But, for the foreseeable future, the networks will be pumping out far more national news than Sinclair is. As Sinclair said in its filing, the Big Three “dominate the national broadcast news offerings in most local markets.” Right now, it all kind of evens out. So, the next time you hear someone say that Sinclair will destroy America by broadcasting politically driven news, you should ask: What news — ABC, CBS or NBC?

[Commentary] Standing up to racism and intolerance is a moral imperative, and those who do, like Heather Heyer, the young woman who died as she challenged the thugs in Charlottesville Aug 12, are champions of American principles. In an era when so many bedrock values are under attack, it’s important to think strategically and prioritize the ones worth fighting for. An exemplar of such strategic thinking, Martin Luther King Jr., fought on multiple fronts but prioritized one in particular: voting rights.

Today, as in the 1960s, that same fight makes sense. For in this new civil rights era, voting rights for broad swaths of Americans — minorities, the young and the old — are again imperiled and under attack. Pushing back hard against those who would purge voter rolls, demand forms of voter ID that many Americans don’t possess, and limit times and venues for voting — this should be a paramount cause for the Trump era.

[Commentary] These are not normal times. The man in the White House is reckless and unmanageable, a danger to the Constitution, a threat to our democratic institutions. Republicans and conservatives around the country should be just as concerned as Democrats about President Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest, his campaign’s relationship with the Russians and whether he engaged in obstruction of justice. They should call him out when he sows division, when he dog-whistles, when he emboldens bigots. They should stand up for global human rights, for constructive engagement with the rest of the world and for other shared American values that transcend party allegiances.

[Commentary] To the dismay of their affiliates, CBS, Disney and Fox included in their lists of "regulatory underbrush" that the Federal Communications Commission should chop out a request to do away with the 59-year-old network rep rule. Bad move. FCC Chairman Pai has presented broadcasting with a rare opportunity to get rid of some truly useless rules and to streamline others. The networks and the affiliates need to avoid mucking things up with an internecine fight.

[Commentary] In the wake of Charlottesville, both GoDaddy and Google have refused to manage the domain registration for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website. Subsequently Cloudflare, whose service was used to protect the site from denial-of-service attacks, has also dropped them as a customer, with a telling quote from Cloudflare’s CEO: “Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.” We agree.

Even for free speech advocates, this situation is deeply fraught with emotional, logistical, and legal twists and turns. All fair-minded people must stand against the hateful violence and aggression that seems to be growing across our country. But we must also recognize that on the Internet, any tactic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against others, including people whose opinions we agree with. Those on the left face calls to characterize the Black Lives Matter movement as a hate group. In the Civil Rights Era cases that formed the basis of today’s protections of freedom of speech, the NAACP’s voice was the one attacked. Protecting free speech is not something we do because we agree with all of the speech that gets protected. We do it because we believe that no one—not the government and not private commercial enterprises—should decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t. For any content hosts that do reject content as part of the enforcement of their terms of service, we have long recommended that they implement procedural protections to mitigate mistakes. These are methods that protect us all against overbroad or arbitrary takedowns.

[Commentary] Several prominent Republicans took to Twitter on Aug 17 to denounce hatred and bigotry in the wake of President Donald Trump's shocking equivocations about the white-supremacist mayhem in Charlottesville (VA). Expressing disapproval in 140 characters or fewer is insufficient when the president angrily asserts that there were some "very fine people" among the bigots waving Confederate battle flags and swastika banners; when torch-bearing marchers chanted "Jews will not replace us"; and when police said one Nazi sympathizer rammed a sports car into a crowd, killing an innocent counterprotester. This is a moment of reckoning for members of the Party of Lincoln: Do they want to stand up for American values, or do they want to keep enabling a president whose understanding of right and wrong has slipped dangerously off the rails? If congressional Republicans choose the former — and history will be watching — they should join together with Democrats to censure President Trump.

Censure is not impeachment. Whether that's appropriate will likely depend on the outcome of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. But censure would constitute a forceful way of rebuking the White House and condemning the vile views of a bigoted fringe, even as those people's right to free speech and peaceful protest is protected under the First Amendment. The political chasm between Democrats and Republicans may be wider than ever. But when it comes to ideologies of hate and racism, the nation's leaders need to speak forcefully with one voice.

[Commentary] Here is what President Donald Trump said August 12 about the violence in Charlottesville (VA) sparked by a demonstration of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members: "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides." Here is what a presidential president would have said:

"The violence Friday and Saturday in Charlottesville, Va., is a tragedy and an unacceptable, impermissible assault on American values. It is an assault, specifically, on the ideals we cherish most in a pluralistic democracy — tolerance, peaceable coexistence and diversity....Under whatever labels and using whatever code words — ‘heritage,’ ‘tradition,’ ‘nationalism’ — the idea that whites or any other ethnic, national or racial group is superior to another is not acceptable. Americans should not excuse, and I as president will not countenance, fringe elements in our society who peddle such anti-American ideas. While they have deep and noxious roots in our history, they must not be given any quarter nor any license today."

[Commentary] The proposed witness list for a September network neutrality hearing at the House Commerce Committee betrays a dismaying ignorance about why net neutrality is an issue.

The committee set the hearing up as something of a clash of titans, inviting the chief executives of the largest broadband providers and the biggest Internet companies, such as Google, Facebook and Netflix. The only thing missing was a steel cage. The point of having net neutrality rules isn’t to protect multibillion-dollar Internet companies. It’s to give other companies a chance to join or topple them. The rapid pace of technological change makes even companies with enormous economies of scale vulnerable to disruption, especially when consumers can easily switch from one shiny online object to the next. Curiously, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and other Republicans have voiced less concern about the prospects of these smaller online businesses — the ones likely to inject a crucial dose of innovation into the 21st century economy — than the ability of giant, consolidating broadband providers to invest in faster, more widely available services. Better broadband connections in rural America, poverty-stricken inner cities and other underserved areas is a most worthy goal. But those connections shouldn’t come at the cost of net neutrality.

If Republican lawmakers don’t like applying decades-old utility-style regulation to broadband providers, they need to work with Democrats to give the commission explicit new authority to protect the open Internet from interference. Otherwise, the fight over how to do that will be always-on too.