Politico

Seeking to prevent another live-streaming "viral video moment" from taking place on the floor of the US House of Representatives, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) has introduced a rules package that would fine and punish lawmakers for recording photos and video from the floor. Lawmakers would be fined $500 for the first offense and $2,500 for each subsequent violation. The fines would be deducted from members’ paychecks.

The move comes in response to Democratic lawmakers, who in June live-streamed a sit-in on the House floor over gun control legislation. Democrats organized the sit-in to protest Republican lawmakers’ decision not to bring to the floor a gun-control bill, which if passed would have broadened background checks and prevented people on no-fly lists from buying guns.

The US government quietly began requesting that select foreign visitors provide their Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts upon arriving in the country, a move designed to spot potential terrorist threats that drew months of opposition from tech giants and privacy hawks alike.

Foreign travelers arriving in the United States on the visa waiver program have been presented with an “optional” request to “enter information associated with your online presence.” The prompt includes a drop-down menu that lists platforms including Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube, as well as a space for users to input their account names on those sites. The new policy comes as Washington tries to improve its ability to spot and deny entry to individuals who have ties to terrorist groups like the Islamic State.

Newly appointed counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said that the incoming White House will have a more or less traditional relationship with the media. "This will be a traditional White House in the sense that you will have a great deal of press availability on a daily basis and you'll have a president who continues to be engaged with the press," Conway said.

The assurance from one of President-elect Donald Trump's most senior advisers comes as other members of Trump's senior staff have said that there might be changes coming to how the White House interacts with the media, from doing away with the daily briefing to rearranging the seating in the briefing room. Conway also said that they will soon announce who will fill the positions of press secretary, communications director and other senior members of the communications team. Republican National Committee chief strategist Sean Spicer is the heavy favorite for the press secretary post, though Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle is also likely to be offered a position on the team in an ancillary role, apparently.

The Senate Commerce Committee is adding a few new Democratic faces, according to a list released by incoming-Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Here’s a rundown of who’s staying and going, assuming the full Democratic Caucus ratifies the moves next month:
Staying : Ranking Member Bill Nelson (FL), Maria Cantwell (WA), Amy Klobuchar (MN), Richard Blumenthal (CT), Brian Schatz (HI), Ed Markey (MA), Cory Booker (NJ), Tom Udall (NM) and Gary Peters (MI).
Leaving: Joe Manchin (WV) and Claire McCaskill (MO).
New: Tammy Baldwin (WI) and Sens.-elect Tammy Duckworth (IL), Maggie Hassan (NH) and Catherine Cortez Masto (NV).

Around half of self-identified Donald Trump voters said in a survey that courts should make it easier for public figures to sue the media.

In the Glover Park Group poll, conducted by Morning Consult, 49 percent of respondents said that courts should make it easier for public figures to sue the news media for unfavorable or false coverage. Twenty-nine percent of respondents said they were opposed to the idea, and 22 percent said they were unsure. Asked about federal spending on public media, 38 percent of respondents said that the current amount should be cut, while 30 percent of respondents said federal spending for public media should remain the same. Twenty-three percent said it should increase, and 8 percent said they were unsure. The survey asked 2,000 self-identified Trump voters to discuss their policy views on a range of issues, including views on the news media.

Commerce Department transition briefing documents lay out actions, issues and potential conflicts of interest that Wilbur Ross will have to deal with in his first 100 days, assuming he is confirmed to lead the sprawling agency. The documents, which appear to have been prepared for members of Trump's Commerce landing team, shed some light on how the agency is framing a number of issues, including at the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. For the first 100 days of the Trump Administration, the document raises the following for NTIA: 1) broadband and two possible bills concerning infrastructure and tax reform, 2) FirstNet, 3) a revision of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, 4) passage of the Mobile Now Act, 5) oversight of Internet governance, and 6) next generation 911 legislation.

Donald Trump's campaign struck a deal with Sinclair Broadcast Group during the campaign to try and secure better media coverage, his son-in-law Jared Kushner told business executives.

Kushner said the agreement with Sinclair, which owns television stations across the country in many swing states and often packages news for their affiliates to run, gave them more access to Trump and the campaign. In exchange, Sinclair would broadcast their Trump interviews across the country without commentary, Kushner said. Kushner highlighted that Sinclair, in states like Ohio, reaches a much wider audience — around 250,000 listeners — than networks like CNN, which reach somewhere around 30,000. Kushner told the business executives that the campaign was upset with CNN because they considered its on-air panels stacked against Trump. He added that he personally talked with Jeff Zucker about changing the composition of the panels but Zucker refused. He repeatedly said in the panel that CNN wasn't "moving the needle" and wasn't important as it once was. The campaign then decided not to work as closely with CNN, and Trump ramped up his bashing of the cable network. He also told the crowd that Google and Facebook are now more powerful, and that The New York Times and CNN aren't as powerful.

[Commentary] As the 2016 wild presidential campaign progressed, that became my ever-more nagging worry and then our collective nightmare—the fear, clearly realized, that all the flood of news and information we’ve celebrated might somehow be drowning us. So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.

But 2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it. And that for my money is by far the most dispiriting thing about this campaign season: not the mind-numbing endless chatter or the embarrassing bottom-feeding coverage or even the stone-throwing barbarians lying in wait to attack any who dare to enter Twitter or Facebook. Facts may be dead, but here’s one I’ll take with me, and it’s a truth as rock-solid as those Facebook feeds are not: elections, in America or elsewhere, still have consequences.

[Susan Glasser is the former editor of Politico.]

Twitter was told it was "bounced" from Dec 14's meeting between tech executives and President-elect Donald Trump in retribution for refusing during the campaign to allow an emoji version of the hashtag #CrookedHillary, apparently. Twitter is one of the few major US tech companies not represented at the Trump Tower meeting attended by, among others, Apple's Tim Cook, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg and Tesla's Elon Musk — an omission all the more striking because of Trump's heavy dependence on the Twitter platform. "They weren’t invited because they aren’t big enough," a Trump transition official said.

Incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus suggested that major changes are coming to the White House press corps. Priebus said "many things have to change" in the White House's relationship and daily traditions with the media, including the daily briefing with the White House Press Secretary and the seating chart. "I think that it’s important that we look at all of those traditions that are great, but quite frankly, as you know, don’t really make news and they're just sort of mundane, boring episodes," Priebus said.

"The point of all of this conversation is that the traditions, while some of them are great, I think it’s time to revisit a lot of these things that have been done in the White House, and I can assure you that change is going to happen, even on things that might seem boring like this topic, but also change as far as how we’re going to approach tax reform, the American worker, how we protect them and business all at the same time why skyrocketing our economy," Priebus said. Priebus said the White House team is currently discussing how to change things up, including where the press sits in the White House briefing room.