Wall Street Journal

[Commentary] Outsider Donald Trump was elected president in significant part because of his promise to shake up Washington. He’ll soon find that one of the most entrenched forces that object to any change affecting them is the White House press corps. As recent meetings with the media showed, a clash is coming.

The clash will go beyond ideology and the media’s dislike of President-elect Trump personally. It will happen because, while the press as an institution is largely in decline throughout the US, the White House briefing room is one of the mainstream media’s last bunkers of power. It’s a place where they dominate—satisfied with the traditions and practices that predate social media—even as the press struggles, especially financially, with how news is made and covered today. The briefing room itself, the place where reporters sit, and the adjacent space in which they are provided offices reflect the power of the mainstream press, based largely on the media-consuming habits of the American people from decades ago. The White House press secretary used to decide who got what seats, but this authority was given to the White House Correspondents Association in the middle of the George W. Bush administration. Nothing prohibits the incoming administration from taking it back. The valuable West Wing real estate occupied by the White House press corps isn’t the property of the press. It belongs to the US government.

[Fleischer was the White House press secretary for George W. Bush]

Preteens and teens may appear dazzlingly fluent, flitting among social-media sites, uploading selfies and texting friends. But they’re often clueless about evaluating the accuracy and trustworthiness of what they find.

Some 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website, according to a Stanford University study of 7,804 students from middle school through college. The study is the biggest so far on how teens evaluate information they find online. Many students judged the credibility of newsy tweets based on how much detail they contained or whether a large photo was attached, rather than on the source. More than two out of three middle-schoolers couldn’t see any valid reason to mistrust a post written by a bank executive arguing that young adults need more financial-planning help. And nearly four in 10 high-school students believed, based on the headline, that a photo of deformed daisies on a photo-sharing site provided strong evidence of toxic conditions near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, even though no source or location was given for the photo.

An analysis by online-search marketer CanIRank.com found that 50 recent searches for political terms on Google surfaced more liberal-leaning webpages than conservative ones, as rated by a panel of four people.

The CanIRank analysis has weaknesses, most notably its reliance on four people’s judgments. Moreover, the findings are somewhat mixed: The searches surfaced more pages rated as “liberal” than “conservative” on a 5-point scale, but more pages were rated “very conservative” than “very liberal.” Still, the report’s findings may fuel concerns about the influence of a handful of internet companies and their often-opaque computer programs. Facebook Inc. is battling accusations that it widely circulated false news stories during the presidential campaign.

AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson made an $85 billion wager in Oct that would turn the giant telephone company into one of the world’s biggest media companies by swallowing Time Warner. The same day, Donald Trump told supporters in Gettysburg (PA) he would block the deal if elected president. “It’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few,” he said, calling the merger “an example of the power structure I am fighting.”

Few companies had more at stake in the presidential election than AT&T, which expected Hillary Clinton to be in the White House, said one former AT&T executive in Washington. Other businesses in a similar position are watching to see if the merger survives a still-undefined Trump administration. For the telecommunication industry, President-elect Trump could usher in an era of deregulation, a change from what many companies viewed as a strong-arm era under President Barack Obama. Yet President-elect Trump’s talk on the campaign trail about crushing the AT&T deal has left executives, lobbyists, bankers and others wondering what his view will be from the White House.

Facebook said it has uncovered several more miscalculated metrics related to how consumers interact with content from marketers and publishers, and simultaneously unveiled additional independent review of some measurements to calm unease over the social network’s data. The company publicly disclosed that a comprehensive internal metrics audit found that discrepancies, or “bugs,” led to the undercounting or overcounting of four measurements, including the weekly and monthly reach of marketers’ posts, the number of full video views and time spent with publishers’ Instant Articles. None of the metrics in question impact Facebook’s billing, said Mark Rabkin, vice president of Facebook’s core ads team.

[Commentary] Regulators say AT&T’s free-data offering for DirecTV violates network neutrality rules. But come January 2017, the regulators may be out the door and those rules may be under threat.

AT&T received a letter from the Federal Communications Commission saying its practice of exempting its own video-streaming service from data-usage caps may violate net-neutrality rules. AT&T has until Nov. 21 to respond, and analysts say the FCC is likely to issue a final ruling halting the offering over the next couple months. But the election of Donald Trump has thrown the agency’s willingness to uphold such a ruling into the air. That makes AT&T’s position the most visible example of the speculation and uncertainty brewing over Trump’s stance on net neutrality—the signature issue of the Obama FCC. Most Republicans strongly oppose the agency’s net neutrality rules, which reclassified broadband internet service as a utility. And the market is betting that the Trump administration will appoint an FCC chairman who shares that view. But President-elect Trump has yet to lay out a clearly defined view of telecom policy.

Windstream Holdings, Inc. and EarthLink Holdings Corp. agreed to a $673 million all-stock merger, combining the network service providers as they look to trim costs amid declining revenue.

Windstream—which provides cloud computing, broadband and voice services—said it expects to issue roughly 93 million shares to complete the deal. EarthLink also provides cloud networking as well as other network services. The companies said the deal is valued at about $1.1 billion including debt. Upon closing of the transaction, expected in the first half of 2017, Windstream shareholders will own 51% of the combined company and EarthLink shareholders will own 49%. The companies believe the increased scale of a combined company—which will keep the Windstream name—will give it the leverage to compete while cutting more than $125 million in annual operating and capital expenses through synergies.

CenturyLink said it plans to sell its data centers and colocation business to a consortium led by BC Partners for $2.3 billion, which it will use in part to fund its planned tie-up with Level 3 Communications. Under the terms of the agreement announced, CenturyLink has agreed to sell the data centers and colocation business for $2.15 billion in cash. It will also receive a $150 million minority stake in the consortium’s new global secure infrastructure company.

CenturyLink recently reached a $25 billion cash-and-stock deal to buy Level 3. The deal would turn CenturyLink—which has grown from a small Louisiana phone provider by scooping up the former Qwest and Sprint’s landlines—into an even more corporate-focused service provider. The combined company would also keep millions of home Internet subscribers, most of whom use slower digital subscriber lines.

AT&T’s practice of exempting its streaming video services from data-usage caps is rankling competitors and shaping up as a major issue for regulators set to weigh the company’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner.

When AT&T rolls out its $35-a-month DirecTV Now online TV service, its wireless subscribers will be able to stream as much as they want without it counting toward their monthly data caps. But if the same customers binge on outside services like Netflix or Hulu, those bits will add up—potentially leading to surcharges. Streaming services are likely to press regulators to scrutinize the practice—known as “zero rating”—in their review of the AT&T-Time Warner deal, people familiar with the matter said. TV networks that have streaming apps, like CBS and ESPN, also may have a stake in the matter. Several companies are likely to argue that AT&T’s DirecTV Now approach is anticompetitive, and will push for conditions on the merger, the people say.

Some Federal Communications Commission staffers already view AT&T’s DirecTV Now exemption as an example of improper zero-rating, people familiar with the situation said, because it disadvantages AT&T’s streaming rivals. The agency is considering how to address zero-rating and whether to raise it as a merger issue, the people said. Other options the agency is weighing include industrywide guidelines on zero-rating.

The disability lawsuits started hitting the Pittsburgh federal courthouse in July, all claiming corporations’ websites violated the law by not being accessible to the blind. The first round came against household names such as Foot Locker, Toys “R” Us, Brooks Brothers Group, and the National Basketball Association. Later suits targeted lesser-known retailers including Family Video Movie Club and Rue21.

All told, about 40 nearly identical cases have landed in front of the same federal judge, Arthur Schwab, all brought by one local law firm, Carlson Lynch Sweet Kilpela & Carpenter LLP. Nationwide, more than 240 businesses have been sued in federal court since the start of 2015, concerning allegedly inaccessible websites, according to law firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP. Most settle quickly, for between $10,000 and $75,000, lawyers involved say, with the money typically going toward plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees and expenses.