Reporting

President Donald Trump has been handing out his cellphone number to world leaders and urging them to call him directly, an unusual invitation that breaks diplomatic protocol and is raising concerns about the security and secrecy of the US commander in chief’s communications. President Trump has urged leaders of Canada and Mexico to reach him on his cellphone, apparently. Of the two, only Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has taken advantage of the offer so far, the officials said. President Trump also exchanged numbers with French President Emmanuel Macron when the two spoke immediately following Macron’s victory earlier in May.

The notion of world leaders calling each other up via cellphone may seem unremarkable in the modern, mobile world. But in the diplomatic arena, where leader-to-leader calls are highly orchestrated affairs, it is another notable breach of protocol for a president who has expressed distrust of official channels. The formalities and discipline of diplomacy have been a rough fit for President Trump — who, before taking office, was long easily accessible by cellphone and viewed himself as freewheeling, impulsive dealmaker.

The New York Times offered buyouts to its newsroom employees, aiming to reduce layers of editing and requiring more of the editors who remain. In a memo to the newsroom, Dean Baquet, the executive editor, and Joseph Kahn, the managing editor, said the current system of “backfielders” and copy editors — two separate groups who have different tasks before a story is published — would be replaced with a single group of editors who would be responsible for all aspects of a story. Another editor would be “looking over their shoulders before publication.”

In a separate memo, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, said The Times would be eliminating the position of public editor. Liz Spayd, the current public editor, will leave The Times on June 2. The buyouts are aimed primarily at editors, but reporters and others in the newsroom would be free to apply as well, the memo said. Baquet and Kahn said that the savings would be used to hire as many as 100 more journalists.

Fight for the Future sees dead people. At least it says a few have somehow filed anti-Title II comments to the Federal Communications Commission according to reports from the deceased's friends.

The group has also found another dozen or so people—twice the original number—who say anti-Title II comments were filed in the FCC docket under their names that they did not submit. In addition, the group said it has been hearing from people saying that a comment was filed under the name and address of a deceased family member. The group claims that over 450,000 fake comments have been submitted and that the FCC "is still refusing to remove fake comments, even when victims call the FCC directly and demand that their name and personal information be removed from a public docket endorsing political messages they don’t agree with." Fight for the Future also said it had received three reports from friends of recently deceased individuals whose names were on comments, saying the comments would have had to be posted posthumously.

TeleQuality Communications filed comments urges changes to the Federal Communications Commission rural healthcare-broadband programs, arguing that the Universal Service Fund (USF) rural healthcare, telecom and e-rate schools and libraries programs would be more effective if they did not operate as isolated silos. TeleQuality, an organization that provides network connectivity for healthcare providers funded, in part, through the USF rural healthcare program. The filing includes some compelling data points, along with some creative ideas for potential reforms to FCC rural healthcare-broadband programs – although some readers may find some of the ideas unrealistic. The most compelling data points in the TeleQuality filing:

• The number of physicians serving rural areas is insufficient. The filing cites a Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) report that found that a majority of rural counties have 1 practitioner serving 3,500 patients when 1 practitioner per 2,000 patients is recommended for adequate care – a finding that confirms similar data that Telecompetitor has reported previously. There is also a shortage of skilled IT personnel in rural areas, TeleQuality argues – another data point that is consistent with previous research on that topic.
• The number of FCC rural healthcare funding requests from healthcare providers has not increased as dramatically as the amount of funding requested – a phenomenon the filing attributes to the significant bandwidth increases needed to run electronic health records systems. At the same time, the FCC program remains underutilized because some healthcare providers do not have the resources to handle program filing and administration.

Michael Dubke, the White House communications director, announced that he was resigning, as President Donald Trump weighs a broader shake-up of his staff in the face of multiple investigations.

Dubke, a veteran Republican strategist who served three months in the role, said that he offered his resignation on May 18 and agreed to stay on until President Trump completed his first overseas trip, which ended over the weekend. Other staff changes could come by the end of the week, White House officials said.

The resignation came as President Trump and his team pushed back against reports that Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, explored the possibility of setting up a secret communications channel to Moscow during the transition between the election and inauguration. President Trump posted a link on Twitter to a “Fox & Friends” article reporting that the Russians, not Kushner, suggested the secret channel and that it was meant as a one-time vehicle to talk about the civil war in Syria. Trump’s tweet came shortly after his counselor, Kellyanne Conway, went on the same program to call the talk of collusion with Russia “just a rush to judgment” and to repeat the president’s support for his son-in-law.

As his city mourns two men who were killed after confronting a man screaming anti-Muslim slurs, Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) is calling on federal officials to block what he called “alt-right demonstrations” from happening in downtown Portland (OR). His concern is that the two rallies, both scheduled in June, will escalate an already volatile situation in Portland by peddling “a message of hatred and of bigotry.” Although the organizers of the rallies have a constitutional right to speak, “hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment,” said Mayor Wheeler. But history and precedent are not on Wheeler's side. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech, no matter how bigoted or offensive, is free speech.

Congressional Republicans knew their plan was potentially explosive. They wanted to kill landmark privacy regulations that would soon ban Internet providers, such as Comcast and AT&T, from storing and selling customers’ browsing histories without their express consent. So after weeks of closed-door debates on Capitol Hill over who would take up the issue first — the House or the Senate — Republican members settled on a secret strategy, according to Hill staff and lobbyists involved in the battle. While the nation was distracted by the House’s pending vote to repeal Obamacare, Senate Republicans would schedule a vote to wipe out the new privacy protections. On March 23, the measure passed on a straight party-line vote, 50 to 48. Five days later, a majority of House Republicans voted in favor of it, sending it to the White House, where President Trump signed the bill in early April without ceremony or public comment. “While everyone was focused on the latest headline crisis coming out of the White House, Congress was able to roll back privacy,” said former Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler, who worked for nearly two years to pass the rules. The process to eliminate them took only a matter of weeks. The blowback was immediate.

Makan Delrahim, who's expected to be confirmed this week as head of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, believes some so-called vertical mergers (such as the proposed AT&T-Time Warner deal) could pose anticompetitive concerns. He also said he will "vigorously enforce antitrust laws with respect to online platforms." "Just because a transaction or particular types of transactions have been approved in the past does not mean that they could not raise competitive concerns in the future," he said in written responses to questions submitted by Senators after Delrahim's short confirmation hearing.

Several advocacy groups have asked the United States Court of Appeals in Washington to stay the Federal Communications Commission’s April 20 decision to relax the national TV ownership cap by restoring the UHF discount in calculating station group coverage.

The effect of the FCC action is to lift the allowable coverage from 39% of TV homes to 78% assuming that all groups in a market are served by UHF stations. The immediate effect of the stay would be to derail Sinclair's proposed $3.9 billion purchase of Tribune Media that would balloon Sinclair's coverage from just below 39% to 72%. The motion for emergency stay pending a full review of the FCC action was filed by the Institute for Public Representations at Georgetown University Law Center on behalf of Free Press, Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ, Prometheus Radio Project, Media Mobilizing Project, Media Alliance, National Hispanic Media Coalition, and Common Cause. The court has given the FCC until June 1 to respond to the motion.

President Donald Trump returned home on Saturday to confront a growing political and legal threat, as his top aides tried to contain the fallout from reports that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is a focus of investigations into possible collusion between Russia and the president’s campaign and transition teams. The White House canceled a presidential trip to Iowa and was putting together a damage-control plan to expand the president’s legal team, reorganize his communications staff and wall off a scandal that has jeopardized his agenda and now threatens to engulf his family.

Behind the scenes, Trump’s advisers were working to create a crisis-control communications operation within the White House to separate the Russia investigations and related scandals from the administration’s day-to-day themes and the work of governing. The goal is to give President Trump more outlets for communicating his message in an unvarnished way, while curbing opportunities for aides to be confronted publicly with damaging developments or unflattering story lines. Under the evolving scenario, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, would take a diminished public role, with daily on-camera briefings replaced by more limited interactions with journalists, while President Trump would seize more opportunities to communicate directly with his core supporters through campaign rallies, social media appearances such as Facebook Live videos, and interviews with friendly news organizations.