Op-Ed

[Commentary] The Mueller investigation of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election is shining a welcome light on the Kremlin’s covert activity, but there is no similar effort to shine a light on the social media algorithms that helped the Russians spread their messages. There needs to be. This effort should begin by “opening up” the results of the algorithms.  The government should require social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to use a similar open application programming interface.

[Commentary]  At the beginning of 2017, the US Press Freedom Tracker started cataloguing every violation of press freedom that took place on American soil, be it through violence, arrest, denial of access, or other threats. This is a selection of those incidents from 2017.

[Commentary] Democrats insist the sky will fall without binding network neutrality rules, which will shortly cease to be in effect after the Republican Federal Communications Commission voted to disclaim the underlying legal power claimed by the Democratic FCC in 2015. But instead of pushing substantive legislation to codify net neutrality (something no Democrat has done since 2011 but Republicans have done twice), Democrats are rallying around the Congressional Review Act — the same tool they denounced in 2017 when Republicans used it to block the FCC’s broadband privacy rules.

[Commentary] The hope of the Arab Spring has been realized: Now that anyone can publish anything from anywhere, it is impossible for even the most determined despot to jail every journalist and critic. But even as the most ruthless dictators are realizing the world has changed, they are quickly learning a new method for dismissing dissent and turning the guerrilla media techniques back on the guerrillas. Their instructor: Donald J. Trump, president of the United States.

[Commentary] Internet intermediaries are increasingly playing the role that publishers and editors once played. From selecting sources to curating trending news to deciding which news is real or fake, companies like Facebook and Google are at the forefront of how much of the world receives its news. Taken together, these internet giants are 10 times the size of the largest media organization 15 years ago, according to media expert Robert McChesney.

[Commentary]  President Donald Trump’s derision hasn’t just seeped into the public consciousness; it’s worked its way into journalists’ bloodstreams, too. Take bad economics, mix in the devaluing of journalism as a profession—both from within and without—and the downgrading of truth in American culture, and you have a recipe for despair. There’s a growing impetus for our best journalists, now and in the future, to write off the profession entirely and opt for a life that’s relatively sane.

[Commentary] Race remains a no-go topic for much of the media—which will have serious consequences for the press.

[Commentary]  President Donald Trump’s proposal to eliminate federal funding for public television rests on the erroneous assumption that public television can rely exclusively on private support. Without the federal investment, this universal service would be impossible. 

[Commentary] This is the dark timeline: Journalism-agnostic media investors learn news can’t “scale” and then jump ship just as soon as they’ve finished killing off both the corporate and independent legacy press businesses, leaving the fate of the industry to ungodly rich people with very idiosyncratic personal agendas. What’s happening to the press is reflective of the broader transformation of our society. Rule by supposedly benevolent technocratic elites is giving way—in large part due to the fecklessness of those technocrats—to straight plutocracy.

[Commentary] How can we improve the biggest tool to closing the digital divide in the Federal Communications Commission’s toolbox: the Connect America Fund. Back in 2011, the FCC adopted a performance goal for the Connect America Fund of ensuring universal access to fixed broadband and concluded it would measure progress towards this outcome based on the number of newly served locations — but it did not articulate any concrete vision for when this universal service goal might be achieved.