Washington Post

When politicians talk about infrastructure, they typically mean the basics: Roads, bridges, ports. The electric grid. Maybe rail, if it's lucky. But Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai wants the government to expand that thinking by including a type of network that 3 out of 4 Americans use on a daily basis, but doesn't often make it on the politicians' lists: high-speed Internet.

“If Congress moves forward with a major infrastructure package, broadband should be included,” said Chairman Pai. He is proposing an ambitious program whereby the FCC could expand corporate subsidies for building networks while scaling back regulations that, he said, deter private investment. In addition, Chairman Pai is asking that Congress offer tax credits to Internet service providers and entrepreneurs who agree to set up shop in “gigabit opportunity zones” that could be as large as a county or as small as a city block.

President Trump's impending budget proposal is expected to include deep cuts to public media, among other things, which would surely delight Republican lawmakers who have been trying, on and off, to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for five decades. If Republican lawmakers are hoping to cripple political coverage by NPR and PBS, however, stopping the flow of taxpayer dollars to the CPB might not have the desired effect.

NPR relies on the corporation for less than 1 percent of its revenue, and PBS depends on the agency for less than 7 percent, according to data from 2014, the most recent year for which audited financial statements for all three entities were available. Because the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has low overhead costs, it distributes almost all of the taxpayer money it receives, in the form of grants. From its $445 million appropriation in 2014, the corporation paid out $441.7 million, or 99.3 percent. Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would primarily affect local public broadcasters, not PBS and NPR. The CPB noted this when the wrote, "The federal investment in public media is vital seed money — especially for stations located in rural America, and those serving underserved populations where the appropriation counts for 40 to 50 percent of their budget. The loss of this seed money would have a devastating effect. These stations would have to raise approximately 200 percent more in private donations to replace the federal investment." In other words, defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would mean hurting the local TV and radio stations that a whole lot of Republican voters watch and listen to.

The Justice Department announced the indictments of two Russian spies and two criminal hackers in connection with the heist of 500 million Yahoo user accounts in 2014, marking the first US criminal cyber charges ever against Russian government officials. The indictments target two members of the Russian intelligence agency FSB, and two hackers hired by the Russians. The charges include hacking, wire fraud, trade secret theft and economic espionage, according to officials. The indictments are part of the largest hacking case brought by the United States.

The charges are unrelated to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. But the move reflects the US government’s increasing desire to hold foreign governments accountable for malicious acts in cyberspace.

A joint news conference in February between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prompted numerous complaints from big-time media outlets. They’d been shut out of the Q&A session in favor of news outlets that they considered friendly to the interests of the Trump White House.

In a discussion about the kerfuffle, Fox News host Shannon Bream asked colleague Howard Kurtz whether such outlets had fretted in the past, when Fox News had been iced out. “Nobody much cared about that in the mainstream media,” responded Kurtz. “I guess that Fox News is part of the mainstream media, but….” I guess? Whoa for a moment here. This is Howard Kurtz, Fox News media critic and a longtime observer of the national media scene. And he isn’t 100 percent sure whether his employer is part of the club known as the mainstream media?

“If you look at the president's tweet, he said very clearly, quote, 'wire tapping' — in quotes,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said during March 13's news briefing, making air quotes with his fingers to emphasize his point. “There's been substantial discussion in several reports…There's been reports in the New York Times and the BBC and other outlets about other aspects of surveillance that have occurred. The president was very clear in his tweet that it was, you know, 'wire tapping' — that spans a whole host of surveillance types of options.” Ah, the old air-quotes defense.

According to Spicer's new argument, President Trump didn't necessarily mean wiretapping when he said “wire tapping” — and reporters should know this because he put the phrase in quotation marks. By “wire tapping,” Trump could have been referring to any one among “a whole host of surveillance types.” Obviously.

Facebook is cutting police departments off from a vast trove of data that has been increasingly used to monitor protesters and activists. The move, which the social network announced March 13, comes in the wake of concerns over law enforcement’s tracking of protesters’ social media accounts in places such as Ferguson (MO) and Baltimore (MD). It also comes at a time when chief executive Mark Zuckerberg says he is expanding the company’s mission from merely “connecting the world” into friend networks to promoting safety and community.

Although the social network’s core business is advertising, Facebook, along with Twitter and Facebook-owned Instagram, also makes money by selling developers access to users’ public feeds. The developers use the data to monitor trends and public events.

[Commentary] You can’t fight propaganda with standard journalism. Watchdogging the fake-news machinery and fact-checking relentlessly is part of the prescription. So too is being more transparent about how we gather and verify the news; covering what’s important (not “barking at every car”); and using clearer labels to distinguish news from opinion. News organizations have to acknowledge their own biases internally, and constantly report against them.

In an age of partisan media, the lines between “partisan” and “media” can sometimes blur. Case in point: The pool reporter covering Vice President Mike Pence on March 9 — that is, the reporter who supplied details about Pence’s daily activities as proxy for the rest of the press corps — was an employee of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. In other words, the news that reporters received about the vice president came from a journalist employed by an organization with a vested interest in the direction of White House and federal policy.

The development is unusual; the reporter, Fred Lucas, is the first member of his organization to take on pool reporting duties, which are typically handled on a rotating basis by mainstream news organizations. Lucas writes for the Daily Signal, a news and commentary site started nearly three years ago by Heritage, one of Washington’s leading policy shops. The Signal covers issues that are a focus of Heritage’s conservative agenda, such as an Obamacare repeal, tax policy and illegal immigration. While there were no objections to Lucas’s pool reports on Vice President Pence, some journalists suggested the presence of the Signal as a member of the pool crossed a symbolic line, into greater legitimacy for the partisan press.

Speaking in front of Washington's top political journalists recently, Vice President Pence said he is — and has always been — an advocate of a free and independent press. He talked about his time as a radio commentator in the 1990s — a “Rush Limbaugh on decaf,” as he had been described. He also brought up his sponsorship of a federal shield law that would have protected reporters from having to testify or reveal their confidential sources. Pence sponsored versions of the legislation a few times when he was in Congress. Although the Free Flow of Information Act never became law, Pence's advocacy for the news media earned him praise from journalists, including an award from a newspaper association.

But while Pence does have a track record of supporting a free press and the First Amendment, that record is tainted and his stance on the public's right to know has become muddled, critics say. During his time as Indiana governor, for instance, Pence found himself rebuked by free speech and open-government advocates — once because of a widely criticized plan to create a taxpayer-funded news service, and again when his staff deleted Facebook comments that disagreed with his stance on same-sex marriage.

[Commentary] While no one is predicting car bombings or poisonings of American journalists, it’s not much of a stretch to see similarities between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attitude. Both leaders want a compliant press and are willing to take action toward getting it — some, of course, more extreme than others.

Russians, overwhelmingly, get their news from TV. “Imagine you have two dozen TV channels and it is all Fox News,” said former deputy energy minister Vladi­mir Milov, now a Putin critic. The tight control is effective: Putin has approval ratings of over 80 percent — ratings that Trump would, metaphorically speaking, kill for. Russia may not be the worst place in the world for journalists, but it is very bad nonetheless. Trump’s admiration for Putin becomes even more troubling when paired with his own moves to stamp out independent journalism through disparagement, denial of access, favoritism and blacklisting. “For Putin, there has been no greater obsession in controlling the culture than in controlling the media,” said Joel Simon, author and executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. For America under Trump, that’s a cautionary tale.