Politico

In Sean Spicer’s first official daily press briefing Jan 23, he said that when you factor in people who streamed President Donald Trump’s inauguration online, it would make it the most-watched presidential inauguration in history. He has a point, but it is one that is almost impossible to prove. The reason? TV ratings and online streaming metrics are not an apples-to-apples comparison, so there is no easy way to calculate exactly how many people watched the inauguration online in a way that is comparable to TV viewership data released by Nielsen.

TV viewership for the inauguration was 30.6 million people, according to Nielsen, down from just under 38 million viewers in 2009. Still, those ratings were good enough to top the inaugurations of Bill Clinton and both George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush. In general, video streaming has been on the rise over the past decade, while linear TV viewership (people watching TV live on their television sets) has declined, but there is not yet data that brings together TV and online video viewership. Spicer cited CNN’s 17 million streams of Trump’s inauguration, which he added to the 2.6 million that watched CNN live on TV. The problem with that is that the 2.6 million figure is not the total number of people that watched CNN, it was the average number of people that watched. The 17 million streams are the total number of streams, not the average number of people watching. That 17 million figure may include people that reloaded the webpage, or that clicked in and watched for 30 seconds, or people where the inauguration started to auto-play on the CNN story they clicked through.

Apparently, President Donald Trump will tap Ajit Pai as his pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission in the new administration, elevating the sitting GOP commissioner to the top spot overseeing the nation's communications industry. The announcement could come as soon as the afternoon of Jan 20, apparently.

Pai, a Barack Obama nominee who has served as the senior FCC Republican for more than three years, could take the new role immediately and wouldn't require approval by the Senate because he was already confirmed to serve at the agency. Pai was widely assumed to be taking the agency’s gavel at least temporarily as an acting chairman at the beginning of Trump’s tenure. But President Trump’s decision to make him a more permanent chairman affords the Kansas-bred Republican a bigger mandate to make his mark on the agency and its rules.

Donald Trump’s takeover of the White House’s website is going to come in on time and under budget — with a larger reboot planned a bit later in 2017.

Trump’s digital team plans to put off for a few months any major overhaul to the official White House online portal, even as it will relaunch to reflect the voice and message of its new occupant almost in tandem with Trump’s swearing in. The new administration is keeping — for now — the basic shell and design built under the leadership of President Barack Obama, including the fonts, format and blue colors that have come to be associated with many aspects of the outgoing Democratic administration. And, recognizing the blowback President Obama got in 2012 for appending information about his own presidency onto the biography pages of some of his predecessors, Team Trump said it won’t touch the sites for past presidents and first ladies. “That content is not political. It’s about the White House as an institution,” said Ory Rinat, who is advising the Trump transition on digital strategy.

President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump described two very different visions for how the White House press corp should operate, with Trump setting the stage for significant changes to the status quo. Trump’s press team has been teasing out the possibility that White House daily briefing may be moved out of the Brady Briefing Room in the West Wing of the White House, perhaps to a space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, or the White House Conference Center. They have also raised the possibility of other changes, including taking over responsibility for which outlets and reporters get credentialed, and which reporters can sit where. Trump himself told Fox News that while the daily briefing will stay in the White House, his press team may restrict access to who can attend.

President Obama, in his final news conference as president, painted a very different picture of the role the White House press corp should play. “Having you in this building has made this place work better. It keeps us honest, it makes us work harder,” President Obama said, apparently in reference to the idea that the briefings should move outside of the West Wing. “America needs you, and our democracy needs you.”

C-SPAN said that an "internal routing error" was responsible for Russia Today suddenly taking over C-SPAN's online video feed. The company said that it had completed and internal investigation, and said that the mistake happened while it was testing for inauguration coverage. "C-SPAN has concluded its investigation and as we had anticipated last Thursday, the interruption of our C-SPAN.org livestream on January 12th was caused by an internal routing error," the statement reads. "C-SPAN.org was not hacked. We have determined that during testing for inaugural coverage, RT's signal was mistakenly routed onto the primary encoder feeding C-SPAN1's signal to the internet, rather than to an unused backup."

President-elect Donald Trump's transition is formally asking CNN to retract an article about Rep Tom Price (R-GA), Trump's nominee for Health and Human Services secretary. In the story, CNN Senior Political Reporter Manu Raju reports that in 2016 Rep Price purchased shares in a medical device manufacturer days before introducing legislation that would delay regulations that would have directly benefited the company. After being published on Jan 16, the story quickly became another piece of ammunition for Democrats who have questioned Rep Price's financial transactions while in office, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) calling for an ethics investigation into rep Price.

In a statement, the Presidential Transition Team said the story "omitted facts and drew conclusions in an effort to attack" Rep Price, before laying out a series of what it says are facts that "were available to CNN." "The Presidential Transition Team requests that CNN retract this blatantly false story," the statement concludes.

Donald Trump attorney general pick Sen Jeff Sessions (R-AL) dodged a question during his Senate confirmation hearings about whether he would subpoena or prosecute journalists for doing their jobs. Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) asked Sen Sessions whether he would abide by current Justice Department regulations that make it difficult to subpoena or prosecute reporters, and whether he would pledge not to "put reporters in jail for doing their job." Sen Sessions offered a non-committal answer. "Senator Klobuchar, I am not sure," he testified. "I have not studied that, those regulations. I would note that when I was the United States Attorney, we knew, everybody knew, that you could not subpoena a witness or push them to be interviewed if they're a member of the media, without approval at high levels of the Department of Justice. That was in the 1980s. So I do believe the Department of Justice does have sensitivity to this issue."

Justice Department guidelines have long required federal prosecutors to receive approval for subpoenaing or prosecuting members of the media. It was these guidelines that prevented an assistant US attorney from indicting a Texas reporter in 1984. The key question is whether Sen Sessions, as the head of the Justice Department, would approve a federal prosecutor's subpoena or prosecution of a journalist.

Republicans in Congress are poised to tackle a host of tech and telecom issues in the new year, empowered by GOP control of the House, Senate and White House. Here's a rundown of the possibilities.

Spectrum targets: Two bills championed by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD) were caught up in the drama surrounding Democratic FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel’s Senate confirmation fight, and Chairman Thune plans on making them a priority at the start of the 115th Congress. One is the MOBILE NOW Act, which would free up government and non-government spectrum for wireless providers and spur work on 5G networks. There's also the FCC Reauthorization Act, which would tweak the agency's responsibilities.

Communications Act rewrite: Both Chairman Thune and incoming House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) have expressed interest in rewriting the Communications Act of 1934 to better reflect the telecom landscape in the digital age.

Surveillance reform: Lawmakers are headed toward another major surveillance debate this year: Whether and how to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Patent trolls: Sen Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said he also hopes to return to the problem of “patent trolls,” which critics say exist solely to extract payments from companies by threatening them with litigation over patent infringement.

White House alumni Tommy Vietor, Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett and Dan Pfeiffer are further investing themselves into their popular podcast "Keeping it 1600" by launching a new media company, called "Crooked Media." To begin with, "Crooked Media" won't be much more than the new incarnation of "Keeping it 1600" called "Pod Save America," which will still be available on iTunes and other podcasting platforms, but soon Vietor, who was formerly President Barack Obama's national security spokesman said the website (which will live at GetCrookedMedia.com) will become a multimedia platform for political analysis and activism.

Vietor said that had Hillary Clinton won, it's likely they would've kept the podcast as what it was - a side hobby. But with the outcome of the election, Vietor said he and his co-founders said they felt a renewed mission. "I think the lesson from (President-elect Donald) Trump is if you're filtering every message and idea you have through traditional media, he will swamp you with a Tweet," he said. "So we need to build up infrastructure that allows people to communicate directly with young people across the country."

The rumor swirling on K Street and Capitol Hill is that Rep Anna Eshoo (D-CA), the top Democrat on House Commerce communications subcommittee, has told people she won’t continue in that role in the new Congress. Rep Eshoo, who has served as the telecommunications ranking member for the last six years, declined to comment, but apparently while it’s not a done deal, they see the likely outcome as her relinquishing the role. The expectation is that rep Eshoo, 74, would retain a rank-and-file seat on the telecom subcommittee and also pursue a spot on Energy and Commerce’s health subcommittee — and potentially throw her hat into the ring to lead Democrats on the health subcommittee, although apparently some are less convinced she would do that.

Rep Eshoo giving up the top slot on the telecom panel, if that’s what winds up happening, would be a blow for tech companies, which she often supports. It would also open the door to new leadership there: Rep Mike Doyle (D-PA), the No 2 Democrat on the subcommittee, would be a top contender to replace her, though Rep Doris Matsui (D-CA) and Rep Gene Green (D-TX) — if Rep Eshoo were to wrest the health subcommittee ranking member post from him — could also pursue the position.