Washington Post

In a Fifth Avenue office near Trump Tower, a company being paid millions of dollars by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign says it has developed a political weapon powerful enough to help the Republican nominee overcome his troubles and win the White House. The key is a psychological model for identifying voters that can “determine the personality of every single adult in the United States of America,” said Alexander Nix, chief executive of Cambridge Analytica. The little-known company, which has operated in the United States for four years, opened its office here only a month ago and is clearly at the center of Trump’s quest for a last-minute comeback against Democrat Hillary Clinton. New federal filings show the campaign’s payments to the firm ballooning from $250,000 in August to $5 million in September.

The reliance on Cambridge reflects a recognition by Trump’s campaign that drastic measures are required to erase a potentially irreversible disparity between Trump’s get-out-the-vote operation and Clinton’s meticulously built machinery. The firm says it can predict how most people will vote by using up to 5,000 pieces of data about every American adult, combined with the result of hundreds of thousands of personality and behavioral surveys, to identify millions of voters who are most open to being persuaded to support Trump.

After rolling out its Fiber product in about a dozen cities, Google is hitting pause on its project to deploy superfast Internet across the country. The news may come as a disappointment to those who were hoping the search giant would bring competition and faster speeds to their area. So, what happened? Here are a few explanations:

Financial pressure from higher-ups: Like many of its siblings in the broader Alphabet family, Google Fiber is likely feeling the heat from top executives who are trying to show investors that their money is being well spent.
Not enough demand: Just like Google Glass — the company's ill-fated attempt to build an augmented-reality visor — Google Fiber may be just a little ahead of its time.
Big incumbents made Google's job harder: Google had an unenviable task in many of its chosen cities: It had to compete with large, established broadband providers who were already there or could benefit from regulations that raised the bar for new entrants.
Providing bundled TV is expensive: There was another major cost Google had to account for when offering its Fiber service. Americans love their double- or triple-play bundles, which reduce the cost of buying Internet from traditional providers.
Wireless broadband is the future: Even as Google Fiber pays lots of money to lay down cables and secure access to TV programming, a different type of technology is coming down the pike: wireless fiber.

The debate about screen time is getting more complicated. As we spend more time each day in front of a screen, concern is growing over the effect it could be having on our brains — particularly the brains of our children. Parents may be silently scolding themselves for giving their kids too much screen time, but the issue is more complicated than simply logging on to computers and other devices.

The week of Oct 17, the American Association of Pediatrics announced new guidance on how parents should think about screen time for their children. And on Oct 24, parent advisory group Common Sense Media released an in-depth look at media use among black and Latino teens, an even more complicated picture of the merits and dangers of screen time. The group decided to commission the case studies after seeing the results of a census of teen media use the group ran in 2015. That report found that teens, on average, were using media in some form for nine hours each day. It also found that minority teens, particularly black and Latino teens, were spending significantly more time with media than their white contemporaries and the overall average. It would be easy to draw some simple conclusions from that result about how socioeconomic factors may affect media use, said Common Sense research head Michael Robb. But Common Sense wanted to see if it could paint a more complex and personal picture, rather than using such a broad brush. Young people in the study also used their phones for critical communication that brings them closer to their families.

Here is an eye-popping figure: "CNN will make approximately $100 million in television and digital advertising revenues more than it would expect in the typical election year," according to NPR. Just to reiterate: That's not $100 million total; that's $100 million on top of the money CNN would have raked in anyway. As NPR's David Folkenflik wrote, "The network has turned a financial corner thanks to the painstaking initiatives of its chief, Jeff Zucker, and to the unpredictable words of another man not employed by CNN: Donald Trump."

Yes, Trump has been good for some in the media business. This has been obvious since the first debate of the Republican presidential primary, which smashed a cable TV viewership record with an audience of 24 million. Before the second debate, Advertising Age reported that CNN was charging 40 times its normal ad rate for the event.

Secret law enforcement requests to conduct electronic surveillance in domestic criminal cases have surged in federal courts for Northern Virginia and the District, but only one in a thousand of the applications ever becomes public, newly released data show. The bare-bones release by the courts leaves unanswered how long, in what ways and for what crimes federal investigators tracked individuals’ data and whether long-running investigations result in charges. Yet the listings of how often law enforcement applied to judges to conduct covert electronic surveillance — a list that itself is usually sealed — underscore the exponential growth in the use of a 1986 law to collect data about users’ telephone, email and other Internet communications.

Donald Trump continued to feed speculation that he will start a television network after Election Day by debuting a nightly webcast on his Facebook page. Also conservative commentator Mark Levin announced his plan to launch Conservative Review TV in December. Meanwhile, the Right Side Broadcasting Network, which has built a loyal following by streaming Trump rallies on YouTube, hopes to add more original programming after the election to become something akin to Glenn Beck's TheBlaze, said the network's founder, Joe Seales. (Of course, Right Side will not be quite like TheBlaze. Seales is a Trump acolyte, but Beck is one of the Republican presidential nominee's harshest critics.)

Then there is post-Roger Ailes Fox News. Anchor Shepard Smith said that network owner Rupert Murdoch “wants to hire a lot more journalists” and build “a massive new newsroom.” “When the biggest boss, who controls everything, comes and says, 'That's what I want to do,' that's the greatest news I've heard in years,” Smith said. “And he didn't mention one thing about our opinion side.” When polls close Nov. 8, the conservative TV landscape could get crowded in a hurry — especially if Trump loses, which he is very likely to do

[Commentary] In an ordinary presidential campaign, press neutrality is essential. But in Donald Trump we have somebody who has threatened democracy by talking about banning an entire religion from entering the country; forcing Muslims in America to register with authorities; rewriting press laws and prosecuting his critics and political opponents; blacklisting news organizations he doesn’t like; ordering the military to do illegal things such as torture and targeting innocents; and much more.

In this case, attempting neutrality legitimized the illegitimate. It’s not just a concern of the “elites” — nor a dismissal of the real grievances of Trump’s followers — to condemn a candidate’s reluctance to accept a bedrock principle of democracy. There’s nothing “brilliant” about a campaign for the presidency that makes scapegoats of women, immigrants and racial and religious minorities. It’s not “impressive” to consort with white supremacists. It’s not “fair and even” to ignore that much of what Trump has done is a threat to democratic institutions. And it is absolutely appropriate to “take sides” in a contest between democracy and its alternative.

Donald Trump's presidential campaign is all about American greatness — unless the subject is freedom of the press, in which case the Republican nominee thinks England is much more tremendous than the United States. Trump reiterated his desire to weaken First Amendment protections, a position he staked out in February when he pledged to “open up” libel laws so that public figures, such as himself, can sue and win cases against media companies more easily.

Trump described his vision in greater detail: "Well, in England they have a system where you can actually sue if someone says something wrong. Our press is allowed to say whatever they want and get away with it. And I think we should go to a system where if they do something wrong — I'm a big believer, tremendous believer, of the freedom of the press. Nobody believes it stronger than me, but if they make terrible, terrible mistakes and those mistakes are made on purpose to injure people — I'm not just talking about me; I'm talking anybody else then, yes, I think you should have the ability to sue them," Trump said. "So you'd like the laws to be closer to what they have in England?" he was asked. "Well, in England you have a good chance of winning. And deals are made and apologies are made. Over here, they don't have to apologize. They can say anything they want about you or me, and there doesn't have to be any apology. England has a system where if they are wrong, things happen," Trump said.

AT&T's $85.4 billion purchase of one of America's top media conglomerates could radically reshape the digital economy, making the deal's next step — regulatory review — hugely important to the way consumers access their media. But missing from the process could be the Federal Communications Commission, a key player in the battery of megadeals to hit the market recently.

The Justice Department is likely to analyze whether the transaction could hurt competition, and it could impose requirements on AT&T that might restrain anticompetitive practices stemming from the deal. The FCC, as the nation's top telecom, cable and broadband regulator, could seek to impose different — but no less important — conditions. But the FCC's involvement hinges on whether Time Warner sells certain assets to AT&T.

If the FCC is excluded from the process, it could weaken regulators' ability to prevent harm to competition, said Gene Kimmelman, a former Justice Department antitrust official who is now president of the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. “The kinds of things I can think of that would potentially prevent anticompetitive behavior may include detailed regulatory oversight that DOJ is not inclined to engage in — and doesn't think it has the capacity to engage in,” he said. “They may be tools that are not available without the FCC being involved.”

The FCC generally has a say in acquisitions that involve the sale of assets regulated by the agency. This may include, for example, TV stations owned by one of the two companies. But in the deal involving AT&T and Time Warner, no such assets may change hands. Time Warner owns just one Atlanta-based TV station, and it has not announced whether the station will be sold to AT&T. The station could be spun off and excluded from the deal — which would also eliminate any reason for the FCC to become involved, said Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG

AT&T's $85.4 billion megadeal to acquire Time Warner is an unprecedented bid to diversify the telecom giant as network operators nationwide scramble to marry their communications pipes with exclusive content. For many of these firms, it's no longer enough to be the conduit to TV shows, films and other creative media. A growing number of them want to be making money from the production and cross-promotion of content, too.

Against this backdrop is Verizon, AT&T's biggest rival in the wireless industry, which has made its own moves toward gaining access to content. But some analysts say the outlook for Verizon is beginning to look gloomier. “You've got the big-league players, and you've got the second-string players,” said Jeff Kagan, an independent telecom analyst. “Verizon — the moves they've made, they make it look more like a second-string player.”