Politico

In an effort to address the spotty access to broadband in many rural regions, Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Jared Huffman (D-CA) introduced the Public Lands Telecommunications Act.

It authorizes agencies with jurisdiction over public-land management, like the National Parks Service, to collaborate with surrounding communities to build a more comprehensive telecommunications infrastructure. “This approach to improved connectivity has something for everyone: visitors could see improved interpretive services and public safety, land management agencies could practice more efficient land management, and neighboring rural and remote communities will benefit from improved broadband access,” Rep Huffman said.

The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit and nonpartisan advocacy group that supports open government and tracks money in politics, announced that it was cutting staff and suspending its data-driven projects and reporting tools. The organization, which launched in 2006 with the express purpose of tracking money in politics, said that it would end its tool building and database maintenance, which are often used by reporters writing about campaign finance and politics.

Michael Klein, the Sunlight Foundation’s board chairman, wrote a post explaining the decision to scale back dramatically. “While we are enormously proud of what Sunlight has accomplished over the past decade, and has come to stand for, we are also aware of the changes time has wrought,” Klein wrote in the post. “We are aware that the robust maturation of technology over the past decade has — happily but substantially — reduced the urgency of Sunlight’s early role as a leading transparency innovator. In addition, the board had to recognize that Sunlight’s initiating objective— to build support for better legislation against and regulation of the power of money in politics— has been significantly limited by the US Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision.”

In a show of joint defiance, the major television networks collectively voted to pull a camera and erase video of Donald Trump giving a tour of his hotel, a protest of the campaign preventing any editorial presence on the tour. According to members of the traveling press pool, after it was made clear that only still photographers and video cameras would be allowed on the pool, the Washington bureau chiefs of the various television networks convened an emergency conference call and agreed to pull the network camera and erase the footage of the tour. "The pool rules state any event that is pooled with cameras, there has to be a pool producer. Due to the fact we were not granted editorial access, as is customary, that decision was made and the footage was erased," a member of the Trump traveling press said.

The tour of the hotel was to take place after Trump made remarks finally admitting that President Barack Obama was, in fact, born in the United States. Though the event was billed as a news conference to set the record straight on President Obama's birthplace, Trump ignored reporters standing on their chairs, shouting questions. He also made only a brief statement of a few sentences on the controversy, spending much of the time being boosted by campaign surrogates and touting his hotel. And then, when Trump was supposed to take the press on a tour of his new hotel, the editorial producer for the network pool was physically detained. "As the designated pool producer; attempted to go on pooled tour, as is customary. Was physically restrained from accompanying the camera," tweeted ABC producer Candace Smith.

Donald Trump took credit for the public's lack of trust in the media, and called out a New York Times reporter, saying he should have been fired. Speaking to New York Post columnist Fred Dicker on his WGDJ-AM radio show on Sept 15, Trump said of a recent Gallup poll showing public confidence in the media at an all-time low: “I think I had a lot to do with that poll … because I’ve exposed the media. If you look at The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and if you look at others: the level of dishonesty is enormous. It’s so dishonest. I can do something that’s wonderful and they make it sound terrible," Trump said. But just a moment later, Trump said he doesn't know if the distrust in the media helps him because "I respect The New York Times. I respect The Washington Post.” “Everybody is talking about the dishonesty — the total dishonesty — of some of the papers and the media generally. CNN is unbelievably dishonest. They call it the Clinton News Network," Trump said. “I am very proud to say that I think I had a lot to do with that poll number.” Trump also said Times reporter Jonathan Martin "would have been fired" by the late Abe Rosenthal, who was executive editor of the Times in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Donald Trump's presidential campaign is ending its blacklist of news outlets, the campaign has confirmed. The blacklist has been in effect at the Trump campaign for nearly a year, with media outlets left out of official events for perceived slights in how they reported on his campaign. The banned outlets at times included Politico, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed and the Des Moines Register. Sometimes journalists for the outlets would be able to attend campaign events as members of the general public, but in several cases they were still removed from the venue when security realized they were press. A Washington Post reporter was once patted down at a Mike Pence event to make sure he did not have a cell phone or laptop on him at an event.

[Commentary] When Donald Trump announced his new campaign CEO in mid-August—Steve Bannon, the pugnacious CEO of the conservative news site Breitbart—the world reacted like wires had been crossed. A figure from the media jumping straight into politics? Even in the world of partisan media, it seemed unusual to give up all pretense of removal from the contest for power to directly pulling the strings. But if it seemed surprising, it shouldn’t have.

Conservative candidates have been able to count on more or less the direct support of networks like Fox for a generation, to say nothing of hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt. And in fact the connection is much, much older than that—older, in fact, than most people assume conservative media is. If you want to understand just how deeply this kind of activism is entwined in the DNA of modern conservative media, you have to go back to 1956, and to the case of a Steve Bannon-esque figure named Clarence Manion, who tried to run his own outsider candidate for president.

[Nicole Hemmer is assistant professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center and co-host of the Past Present podcast.]

NBC's Lester Holt, ABC's Martha Raddatz, CNN's Anderson Cooper, Fox News' Chris Wallace and CBS' Elaine Quijano will moderate presidential and vice presidential debates this fall, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced.

Holt, anchor of NBC's "Nightly News,” will moderate the first debate at Hofstra University in New York on Sept. 26, which will be a traditional debate divided into six segments of 15 minutes each on major topics to be determined by Holt. Quijano, an anchor on CBS' live streaming service CBSN, will moderate the vice presidential debate on Oct. 4 at Longwood University in Virginia, which will be a traditional debate as well — divided into nine timed segments of 10 minutes each. Raddatz, ABC's Chief Global Correspondent and co-anchor of "This Week,” along with CNN anchor Cooper, will moderate a town-meeting style debate on Oct. 9 at Washington University in St. Louis. There, the questions will be posed directly by citizen participants made up of uncommitted voters based on topics "of broad public interest as reflected in social media and other sources." Wallace, host of "Fox News Sunday,” will become the first Fox News host to moderate a general election debate since the network's founding. He will host the final presidential debate on Oct. 19 at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. The format of the final debate will be the same as the first.

Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen Tim Kaine (D-VA) confirmed that the Clinton campaign will establish a "protective pool," at least for his own campaign travel.

The Clinton campaign has been using Donald Trump's total lack of a normal press pool to delay ramping up their coverage to a full protective pool--the group of reporters that travel with the candidate on the same plane. The campaign has indicated to some reporters it would not establish the protective pool before Labor Day. "We are not on the plane together," Sen Kaine said about his traveling press corps. "But that is going to change in about a week. And I think that is fairly common during campaigns that you often fly in small planes and that you get to the end, you start flying in larger planes. I think that is something, yeah, as we get into the thick of the campaign in Labor Day, that is going to change. I don't even think Donald Trump allowed the American press to go with him yesterday when he went to Mexico. Which was highly unusual."

The print pool rotation for covering Donald Trump will include outlets that his campaign has blacklisted. BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, Politico and The Washington Post are among the blacklisted outlets that will be part of the pool rotation, which begins the week of Aug 29. BuzzFeed is the first outlet to act as official print pooler, through which reporters send out shared reports about Trump’s activities to the rest of the outlets on the pool rotation. "We just wanted to thank you for your patience over the past few weeks,” reads an e-mail sent to the Trump pool list, which will be managed by reporters from The New York Times and Time magazine. “But we are pleased to announce that after some start-and-stop negotiations with the Trump campaign, we are debuting our full print pool this week, starting with BuzzFeed today in Washington.”

According to a source familiar with the negotiations, which have been ongoing for months, those representing the pool demanded that only the pool could determine its membership and not the campaign. What’s not clear though is whether the banned outlets will be allowed to attend Trump campaign events as media when they are not on pool rotation.

[Commentary] E-Rate is almost the perfect Washington DC program. It hits the hot buttons of education, technology, and good jobs at good wages in one shot and spreads federal monies to vendors and consultants in every corner of the country. And no politician has ever been defeated for public office by touting improved Internet connections at local schools. But in a large study of students in North Carolina, two colleagues and I recently found that the actual benefits for students—the kids the program is supposed to help—are about zero. In fact, our research found that the E-Rate program marginally hurt student performance rather than helped it.

To investigate the impact of E-Rate and to focus on the current example proffered by the President, my colleagues (Ben Schwall of Clemson and Scott Wallsten of the Technology Policy Institute) and I studied how broadband subsidies in North Carolina related to learning. Gathering data on all public high schools in the state from 2000-2013, including how much E-Rate funding was sent to schools, we investigated how SAT scores in math and verbal reasoning changed with increased Internet subsidies. Holding other school and socio-demographic factors constant, the changes were small but the finding was statistically significant. Except the relationship was negative. In other words, the more E-Rate funding a school received, the worse its students performed.

[Thomas Hazlett is H.H. Macaulay Endowed Professor of Economics at Clemson University, where he also directs the Information Economy Project. He formerly served as Chief Economist of the Federal Communications Commission.]