Washington Post

Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Commerce Department, cleared a key Senate panel with bipartisan support, signaling an easy path to confirmation. The Senate Commerce Committee approved Ross's nomination in a voice vote with no opposition.

Ross amassed his fortune by investing in distressed industries that have been hard hit by the forces of globalization, including steel, coal and textiles. He was one of Trump’s key advisers on trade policy on the campaign trail and is slated to take a leading role in carrying out the White House’s promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. During his confirmation hearing, Ross advocated the need for bilateral trade deals rather than sweeping agreements such as the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership.

DC media stalwarts Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei (formerly of Politico, now of Axios) broke down President Trump’s media habits. No books, lots of TV. Newspapers, but only certain ones. Lots of political talk shows, both on the nets and on radio. We combined the Allen-VandeHei analysis with our own observations of Trump’s Twitter activity and statements to put together this approximate Week in Presidential Media-Watching.

President Trump has named Ajit Pai, an advocate of deregulation and a critic of the government's network neutrality rules, as the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Pai's new position will give him control over the nation's most powerful telecommunication and cable regulator, with a 2-1 Republican majority that is widely expected to begin undoing some of the Obama era's most significant tech policies.

The Indian-American who grew up in Kansas had until now been a sitting Republican commissioner at the FCC — meaning he will not need to be confirmed by the US Senate before serving as the agency's 34th chairman. Pai was a staunch critic of Democratic efforts aimed at breaking the dominance of some of America's biggest Internet providers, including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon.

President Trump began recasting America’s role in the global economy, canceling an agreement for a sweeping trade deal with Asia as one of his first official White House actions. After meeting with business executives to discuss the US manufacturing industry, President Trump headed to the Oval Office to sign an executive order formally ending the United States’ participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The move was largely symbolic -- the deal was unlikely to make it through Congress -- but it served to signal that President Trump’s tough talk on trade during the campaign will carry over to his new administration.

Questions about the Trump administration’s handling of factual information could lead to more of what has already happened in the past when there have been gaps in the government’s data: outside groups, including news organizations, trying their best to find answers. “[If] we can’t assume good faith and good practices in government data, it’s going to be a lot more work for everyone,” said JM Berger, a fellow with the International Centre for counter-Terrorism at The Hauge. “Government data isn’t always reliable or complete, and journalists and academics have filled in the gaps before, but if we have to question and vet everything on a consistent basis, it’s going to command a lot of our resources and make it harder to do new and important research.”

[Commentary] Here is one thing we learned about the new Trump White House: It views the institutional role that the news media is supposed to play in our democracy with nothing but total, unbridled contempt. We may be looking at an unprecedented set of new challenges for the media in covering the new president. What remains to be seen is how it will respond.

The New York Times reports this morning that journalists are deeply alarmed by statements made by Trump’s top advisers over the weekend, in which they faulted the media for reporting accurately on his inaugural crowd size. But I fear these journalists are understating the problem. This isn’t simply a matter of signaling bad relations. Rather, what President Trump and his advisers are doing is explicitly stating their contempt for the press’ institutional role as a credo, as an actionable doctrine that will govern not just how they treat the press, but how they treat factual reality itself.

US counterintelligence officials are sifting through intercepted communications and financial data as part of a wider look at possible ties between the Russian government and associates of President-elect Donald Trump, officials said. But while it has been clear for months that a broad investigation is underway, what remains murky — even to lawmakers receiving closed briefings — is its scope and target. It is unclear if the intercepts being examined have any connection to the Trump campaign. But the investigation adds to the uncertainty surrounding Trump’s relationship with Russia even as he is sworn in as president. U.S. intelligence agencies have already concluded that Russia interfered in the election to help Trump win. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has been under FBI scrutiny for some time, including for allegations of illegal financial dealings in Ukraine, current and former U.S. officials said. Manafort has done business in Russia and Ukraine. The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, CIA and the National Security Agency, which intercepts phone calls, emails and other electronic communications of foreigners overseas, are also involved in the probe.

Don't mess with CNN. That's the unvarnished version of a message that the network's president, Jeff Zucker, delivered to President-elect Donald Trump in an interview. "One of the things I think this administration hasn’t figured out yet is that there’s only one television network that is seen in Beijing, Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo, Pyongyang, Baghdad, Tehran and Damascus — and that’s CNN," Zucker said. "The perception of Donald Trump in capitals around the world is shaped, in many ways, by CNN. Continuing to have an adversarial relationship with that network is a mistake."

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take the Oval Office, one high-profile tech issue that many analysts are watching is network neutrality. Republicans are widely expected to seek changes to the rules, which currently bar Internet providers from slowing down websites they don't like or speeding up others in exchange for payment. But one staunch backer of the rules isn't too worried about the impending rollback, and that's Netflix. It believes it's become so big that any changes to the net neutrality rules aren't likely to affect its business much at all.

“Weakening of US Net neutrality laws, should that occur, is unlikely to materially affect our domestic margins or service quality because we are now popular enough with consumers to keep our relationships with ISPs stable,” the company wrote. “We hope the new U.S. administration and Congress will recognize that keeping the network neutral drives job growth and innovation,” the letter reads. “It's understandable that people describe this as Comcast versus Netflix,” said Matt Wood, policy director of the consumer group Free Press. But, he said, “We [are] concerned about the next innovative company that doesn't have the ability to buy itself out of trouble.”

Once pilloried by consumer advocates and comedian John Oliver as a shill for big business, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler took many by surprise as he brought challenge after challenge to the dominance of the companies he once represented. “I have always been the insurgent versus the incumbent,” he said.

Welcoming the votes of his Republican colleagues when it was politically convenient, forging ahead unilaterally when it wasn't, Chairman Wheeler sought to turn a staid federal office better known for policing celebrity wardrobe malfunctions and distributing airwave licenses into a consumer protection agency that would shape U.S. companies and technologies of the future. But now a dark cloud looms over Wheeler's legacy as Republicans — led by President-elect Donald Trump — prepare to undo some of the most significant regulations approved under his watch. No policy inspires as much fury among technologically minded Republicans as net neutrality, a signature FCC initiative that turned Internet service into a kind of 21st-century utility. Subjecting Internet providers to the same obligations that traditional phone companies must meet, Wheeler's decision to ram the policy through over conservative objections led to intense outrage from his political opponents. A federal court upheld the rules in the face of an industry lawsuit, appearing to settle the matter once and for all.