Children and Media

Nationwide, rural communities have 37% more residents without access to high-speed internet connections when compared with their urban peers. This becomes a problem as classrooms have become increasingly digital, says Kathryn de Wit, manager of the broadband research initiative at The Pew Charitable Trusts.

The Federal Communications Commission completed a three-month, Congressionally-mandated report by the FCC's Media Bureau looking into the television content rating system.

This report profiles six key trends, six significant challenges, and six developments in educational technology for higher education.

The “digital divide” commonly refers to the question of who has access to the Internet, but at least when it comes to race and income, that gap is pretty insignificant. Policymakers are too busy bridging a fake divide to notice the real one right under their noses. The real divide is actually in time spent on screens, and there, the gap is enormous.

Over 20 years ago, the US Supreme Court unanimously decided Reno v. American CivilLiberties Union (ACLU), which found the communications decency provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to be unconstitutional. Applying a strict scrutiny judicial review standard under the First Amendment, the Supreme Court concluded that unlike broadcasting (where the FCC’s “indecency” content regulation consistently has been upheld due to the unique characteristics of that medium), no government regulation would be constitutionally permissible—even for online child protection.

Almost 340,000 youths in Pennsylvania who do not have access to a reliable broadband connection. At Penns Valley Area High School (PA), where at least 8% of students have only dial-up internet access at home, many teachers don’t assign internet-based homework.

In an innocuous-sounding "rule change" to the Communications Act of 1984, the Federal Communications Commission would allow cable providers to deduct "in-kind" services from a local franchise fee to municipalities required by the Act, specifically a maximum five-percent levy on gross revenues. "In kind" is currently a term without a clear definition, and in a particularly diabolical twist, the FCC plans to leave it to the cable companies to determine the monetary value of such nebulous services (and exactly what those services are) before deducting that value from their mandated fee.

Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) announced that he is proposing new legislation to protect children from the dangers of the internet. The bill, called the Kids Internet Design and Safety (KIDS) Act, lays out six areas for new regulation:

Apple announced a new initiative in support of leading nonprofit organizations in the US and Europe that offer nonpartisan, independent media literacy programs. The News Literacy Project (NLP) and Common Sense in the US and Osservatorio Permanente Giovani-Editori in Italy will each receive support from Apple to advance their efforts in empowering young people with the critical thinking skills necessary in today’s digital age.